Phil L wrote:
Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:41:24 GMT, Phil L wrote:

I believe it takes time before they die in agony.
they don't die in agony, they simply fall asleep and don't wake up
Hum, the young rat that had (mistakenly) decided that living in our
house was better than the compost heap wouldn't agree with you. It
was not very happy after taking the poison we put down. Loud rasping
breathing, dragging itself slowly about. I put it out of its misery
with a blow to
the head.

It may have been ill before it ate the poison :-p

They don't "simply fall asleep and don't wake up". They die from
multiple internal haemorrhages.


They're usualy comatose before anything internal occurs

Dave's right, I looked the stuff up. It's related to Warfarin, and
interferes with vitamin K metabolism. This stuffs the clotting
reactions in the body, and the victim dies of internal bleeding. (yes,
that is the same Warfarin you take for heart problems - in smaller doses)


"the first population of warfarin-resistant brown rats (Rattus
norvegicus) being discovered in Scotland in 1958"... "Already in 1976
the first case of [coumarin] resistance was detected in UK where 6 of 72
brown rats from five farms survived a 6-day feeding
test" ... "The importance of resistance to the second-generation
anticoagulants may be indicated by the situation revealed in British
rodent surveys in 1970 and 1980: The proportion of rat-infested
farmsteads in Hampshire, where difenacoum had been the rodenticide of
choice since 1975, increased in this period from 45% to 95% (Greaves et
al. 1982c)."

Mogens Lund, "RESISTANCE TO THE SECOND-GENERATION ANTICOAGULANT
RODENTICIDES"

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/vi...&context=vpc11

Andy