Making A Killing Killing

I’m an environmental advocate, animal rights activist, and a consultant for In Defense of Animals. More importantly, I’m a nature lover — and a horrified citizen.  Horrified, because of what I’ve learned about the massive poison drop planned for the Farallon Islands National Marine Sanctuary.  And the underlying reasons for it — which are not in the Half Moon Bay Review’s Feb 21st, 2024 article.

To win public support for this massive mouse extermination project, euphemisms like “remove” and “restore” hide the reality of a profit-driven enterprise that is both unnecessary and ecologically disastrous.  Literally tens of thousands of rat poison-infused bait pellets will rain down, from helicopters, in a National Marine Sanctuary off the coast of California.

A lexicon of euphemisms are deployed by its proponents to fool the public into paying millions of tax dollars for a large-scale extermination-by-poison — in a nature sanctuary. The public remains mostly misinformed and misled with hyperbolic narratives about a “non-native” mouse “invasion.”

But these aren’t rats in your basement. What’s being promoted for the Farallones, and being pushed on an under-informed public, is an extermination project on an industrial scale. Literally thousands of pounds of a toxic Brodifacoum rat poison pellets will be dropped by helicopter. Any animals who eat the poison — or who eat animals who have eaten the poison — will be maimed or killed.

Poisoning campaigns like this are outlawed on land — but a regulatory loophole, carved out by the chemical industry, allows mass poisonings-at-sea — even in a federally protected marine sanctuary.  Which demonstrates both the chemical industry’s political power, and its public relations prowess. 

The poison project’s proponents don’t want you to understand that the island’s mice, living there for over a century (since the mid-1800s), have become integrated into the ecosystem.  Mice have become a food source for marine birds.  This is what wild nature does naturally, animals and plants and entire ecosystems change and adapt over time.  But there is no profit in acknowledging this reality. Not while there is literally billions of dollars to be made killing tens of thousands of wild plants

Pesticides and herbicides should never be used in sanctuaries because they are chemicals which kill broadly and indiscriminately.  Ironically, this carpet-bombing of poison over the island, to supposedly help Ashy storm petrels, will likely kill some of them, too.

And it gets worse. Thousands of so-called “non-target” sea birds will also be poisoned and die.  The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that over 1,000 Western gulls will die along with the mouse “target” species, Mus musculus. For all animals who eat the poison — which is Brodifacoum, a highly toxic, 2nd-generation anti-coagulant poison — it’s a slow, gruesome death by internal bleeding and organ failure. 

Many of these 1,000+ gulls — what the industry calls “by-kill” — are expected to wash up dead on the shores of San Francisco and the San Mateo coast.

How many other species of birds will be poisoned and/or killed?  We won’t know.  How much poison in total will be dropped on the Farallones?  That’s unknown too.  Helicopters will initially drop an estimated 3,500 lbs. of poison-laced bait pellets.

The contractors themselves, including Point Blue Conservation, anticipate the need for a second drop, and acknowledge a possible third drop.  They readily admit that every single mouse must be killed, or else the surviving mice will reproduce quickly, as mice do.  But of course, what’s not said out loud… in the extermination industry, this would simply mean repeat business.

No independent, third-party monitors will count corpses. The contractors claim few poison pellets will enter the Pacific Ocean — even while dropping tens of thousands of them from helicopters.  Does that sound plausible to you?

The project will most likely be declared a success, as so many similar, toxic island “restoration” projects have, regardless of the outcome — because no independent, third-party verification is mandated.  There will be no survey of the “by-kill” — the thousands of birds and marine animals who will be poisoned to death on the island or die off-island.  There is strong financial incentive to not count the corpses.

Also dead-on-arrival is science.  In the Farallones extermination, and all such similar poisonings, there is no acknowledgement that animals and ecosystems — including introduced mice, rats and others species, along with interconnected food webs — naturally evolve and change over the years.  Remember that complex web of interdependent life you learned about in grade school?  They don’t. The make money by ignoring it.

Once a dangerous foreigner, always a dangerous foreigner. Kill them! Kill them all!

Actual conservation biologists — those not on the chemical industry payroll — know animal and plant species are always moving, across continents, across oceans, and onto islands long before European ships introduced animals. But to accept this biological science — and common sense — would undermine the entire kill-the-invasive-non-natives “Invasion Biology” narrative. And undercut their multi-billion dollar, profit-driven industry.

Since 1962, when Rachel Carson first warned us of the toxic pesticides industry in “Silent Spring,” poison manufacturing and sales have increased exponentially.

Bombarding the Farallones with rat poison is only good for one thing: making millions for the chemical industry.

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Jack Gescheidt is an environmental advocate and activist, founder of The TreeSpirit Project, and a consultant for In Defense of Animals. He lives in Marin County, CA.

A version of this article was published in the March 5, 2024 Half Moon Bay Review

For more information about the Farallon Islands poison drop: http://www.TreeSpiritProject.com/Farallones