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 The indiscriminate use of poison and toxins affects wildlife worldwide from the condors in California to gharials in India and Europe is no exception to this. The use of poisons to control wildlife is illegal according to European legislation. Nevertheless, the use of poisoned baits to control predators is one of the main causes of unnatural death in a number of protected species including vultures, eagles, bears, and wolves. It has lead to declines in numbers, and even local extinctions in some species. The worrying fact is that this practice is on the increase; the number of incidents of poisoning recorded has been rising since 1990.
The situation continues to worsen because of easy access to potent agricultural toxins such as organic-phosphates and carbamates which have taken the place of the more traditional strychnine as poison of choice. Also those setting the poison are rarely prosecuted; detecting the illegal use of these substances is difficult, and adequate proof of their illegal use even more so.
Spain, Greece, France, UK, Bulgaria, Austria, Portugal, Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Macedonia. But, for example, even the Netherlands, which is generally believed to be free of the problem has reports of birds of prey being poisoned to protect racing pigeons. No country is free of this plague! | |
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Not only is the use of poisons cruel and illegal, it is also non-selective; the victims of poisoned bait are not necessarily the intended target; it may kill a rare species when its objective was a common one, it may kill a vulture instead of a feral dog and may even kill a much loved domestic pet. Furthermore it can inadvertently impact reintroduction programmes such as those for the white tailed sea eagle in Ireland or the red kite in the UK .
As of now, there is no precise data on the impact of this problem in many countries, but figures from Spain indicate more than 6500 endangered species were killed by poison in the last two decade including 638 black vultures, 7 bears, 348 Egyptian vultures and 114 Imperial eagles (the population of which currently only stands at 200!!). Nevetheless we do know that the problem is prevalent throughout Europe and that the number of cases of death due to poison among protected species is alarming in many countries such as: