My husband and I live in Martinez and we read your newspaper column every morning. I wanted to write to you when I found your website and your post urging caution with using rat bait. I learned the hard way this afternoon that rat bait stations are not pet-proof. Rats have been making a mess of my tomato plants in my backyard, so I put out a Tomcat Rat Bait Station. I put bricks on it, chicken wire around it, and cut up brush on top of it, to disguise the bait station and keep my little 18 pound 2 year old terrier-mix dog away from the bait. My dog is an in-door dog, so I thought that the rat bait station would be safe thus disguised in my backyard. I was wrong. I let me dog out into the backyard this after noon when she stood by the back door as usual to go out. After a little while (at most 30-minutes), I heard the sound of her throwing something plastic around the patio. I went out to discover that she had somehow retrieved the rat bait station, and she had dragged it down from our back slope onto our concrete patio and was tossing it around to dislodge pieces of blue rat bait. I didn’t see her actually eat the bait, but I assumed that she must have.

It being Sunday, her regular vet was closed. I took her to the emergency vet in Concord. They gave her a shot and her vomit come out blue…thus confirming that had indeed consumed some of the blue rat bait. The vet later fed her activated charcoal to help to bind-up any residual poison in her stomach. Unfortunately, a blood test confirmed that she had already absorbed some of the poison, and it was affecting her blood, so the vet sent her home with a prescription of vitamin K. I was told to followup with her regular vet in two days and have her blood retested.

Interestingly enough, the gentleman who arrived at the Concord emergency vet clinic right after me with his very large yellow lab had a similar problem. Due to rats in his backyard, he had distributed Tomcat Rat Bait in packets underneath his deck because he thought his dog would not be able to fit under the deck and reach the bait. He discovered that his dog had in fact eaten the bait because his dog’s feces was blue. The blood test that the emergency vet took confirmed that his dog had ingested and absorbed rat bait.

I now do not know how to safely dispose of the bait station and the remaining unused bait. I also do not know what I can do to safely and humanely address the rat problem. We do not have any wood piles and our yard is very tidy…however, very large tomato plants. I have talked to my neighbors, and they are having similar problems with large brown outdoor rats. So, now that I know that rat bait is unsafe, I do not know what vermin control method to try. My terrier is only two years old, but this month she has caught and killed (but not eaten) two large brown rats in our backyard on two separate occasions in the morning when we let her out around. Given that she is an in-door dog, her hunting skills don’t seem enough to control what seems to be a rat population explosion this summer. Help!