The Federation of Consumers in Action (FACUA), and nature conservation associations denounce the use of poisoned grain to eradicate Common Voles, because is an evident risk for public health and for the survival of numerous hunting species and protected species, so they request to immediately stop using this measure.

The Regional Government of Castilla y Leon, recognized last week that they can not guarantee that the poisoned grain that it is being distributed in more than 600 municipalities of the region, will not be accessible to other species apart from Common Voles. In fact, the technique that is being used and that consists on depositing poison in small cylindrical containers is not effective. The problem is that the contaminated grains can easily get out of the tubes by any small movement.

Few hours after the beginning of the media veda, the Regional Ministry of Health of Castilla y Leon issued a communique in which they recommended, with the purpose of avoiding poisonings, not consuming any of the species hunted in the areas where clorofacinone had been spread out. The media veda, is the hunting season in which different species of pigeons can be captured, as well as quails, all of them consumers of grains (therefore, very susceptible to be poisoned) and that are normally consumed by hunters or in specialized establishments. These species are migratory birds, reason why even in municipalities that have not been treated with clorofacinone have a high risk to receive birds that come already intoxicated from other areas.

Inexplicably the regional administration has not considered the reports made by the Department of Forensic Veterinary and Toxicology of the University of Murcia and the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Leon, as a response to the poisonings of March. In these reports they inform about the “risk of secondary poisoning” and about the “risks for public health” that the eating of animals poisoned with clorofacinone could have on people. In addition, the anticoagulant poisons can enter the human food chain in several ways; it is known that the major concentrations of Common Voles are in areas with certain humidity and near fertile lowlands, streams and wetlands. This way, the massive drowning of Common Voles and other intoxicated species could also intoxicate in an indirect way, springs, streams and aquifers, to the water that later is consumed by people and domestic cattle. In addition, the poison used for example, in the irrigation farming, can quickly arrive through the ground and be absorbed by grown vegetables such as potatoes, beets and other plants that have great power of absorbing substances of the ground. Also, it is necessary to consider that they are thousands of people in hundreds of towns (holidaymakers, tourists, etc) that do not know the measures that the Regional Government of Castilla y Leon is taking, so they take walks through areas that are poisoned without knowing it, because they are not signposted. Moreover, the children can be attracted by the poisoned eye-catching dyed tubes or grains. It is necessary to remember that the ingestion of clorofacinone by oral route has an acute toxicity for people. In regards to hunting, the use of poisoned grains can provoke the large-scale disappearance of species such as the hare and the rabbit, since mammals are especially sensible to this substance.

In addition, the birds could also be seriously affected, and it will also provoke the large-scale disappearance of species such as the Red-legged Partridge, the Anatidaes, quails or pigeons (within this group the Zenaida and the Stock pigeons are species in serious decline for the last two decades). Finally, it is necessary to highlight that hunting dogs also in danger of getting poisoned, due to their facility to easily consume rodents and other intoxicated wild species.

The environmentalist's organizations reiterate that the poisoned grain will affect directly the protected species such as the Great Bustards and infinity of small birds. In addition, many predator species will consume the intoxicated Common Voles and will die by secondary poisoning. Among the rodent predators that will be more affected, it should be emphasised more than 30 species of terrestrial carnivores, nocturnal and diurnal birds of prey, reptiles and corvids, all of them effective Common Voles hunters. Furthermore, the predators, especially birds, tend to concentrate themselves wherever the plagues of rodents take place.

The reduction of natural predators by the effects of the poison will show that the rodent control strategy carried out was not the wished one, neither now nor in coming years. Only when the population of Common Voles gets stabilized by its own cyclical evolution and the specialist predator species will maintain in low levels the population of this rodent, the Regional Government of Castilla y Leon will realize about the error committed.

These are the reasons why the Federation of Consumers in Action (FACUA), and nature conservation associations request the Regional Government of Castilla y Leon to immediately stop using this measure. They request for this as a precautionary measure, because they already know the serious risks that exist for public health and for the survival of animal species (protected, domestic and for hunting), specially when using these products in open fields, because its use should only be under strictly controlled conditions.