[A/S] Re: POISON Was: Mickey and his family?

[Ed Johnson <ejohnso1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oh, Bushtit! (a kind of bird, by the way...)

The active ingredient of virtually all mouse and rat poisons on
the market today is warfarin.

The LD50 (a measure of toxicity) for warfarin in most mammals,
including humans, is about 200mg/Kg of body weight for PURE
WARFARIN. d-CON and other common mouse baits contain .2% to .5%
warfarin.

When you consider a small dog that weighs 8 Kg., it would take
1600 mg., or the equivalent of 32 aspirin tablets of PURE
WARFARIN to be fatal. You can quickly see that it would take a
huge amount of the .2-.5%  d-CON to cause a problem, let alone
exposure to a mouse that has been killed by the stuff. In fact,
it takes several feedings of d-CON to kill a mouse. The fact that
it can even kill them at all is due to the fact that the fatal
dose is much lower for chronic ingestion, in other words many
smaller doses over a 2 or so day period.

           ....Ed...