Every day, all across this country, thousands of dogs and cats are killed in shelters because no one wants them and there is not enough room to house them. The two most commonly used methods of killing these animals are by lethal injection or the use of a gas chamber. When lethal injection is the chosen method, the drug most frequently used is sodium pentobarbitol, a potent drug that, when given intravenously, produces rapid unconsciousness without pain or distress to the animal. It is considered by many to be the most humane method of euthanasia. What most people don’t realize is that this drug poses a risk of secondary poisoning if another animal ingests the body of the dead animal.
In many areas, after the animals are killed, the bodies are taken to a landfill and unceremoniously dumped with the other trash. Regulations usually require that the bodies are to be covered with a substantial layer of dirt that day, but that doesn’t always happen. When these bodies are left uncovered, scavengers are soon attracted to them.
The bald eagle, our nation’s symbol was, until recently, an endangered species, trying to recover, with our help, from the effects of DDT and other environmental pollutants. The eagle is a talented hunter, able to find food both on land and in the water, but it is also an opportunistic feeder, and will dine on carrion when it finds it. In South Carolina, sixteen bald eagles have been found disabled and taken to the Center for Birds of Prey during the past three years. Ten were confirmed to have eaten pentobarbital, and it was the suspected cause in the illness of the other six. Of the sixteen eagles, five died and the others recovered. It was determined that they had been eating the bodies of recently euthanized dogs and cats that had been disposed of at local landfills and left uncovered.
Sodium pentobarbitol is a sedative/anesthetic, and symptoms in affected birds include drowsiness, lack of coordination, and finally, unconsciousness and death. Poisoned birds are usually found near the toxic food source, but can also be discovered at distant locations.
In the western states and in western Canada, when cattle are found to be sick or seriously injured in remote areas, they are destroyed and left there. We just assumed that the standard method of euthanasia out there was a bullet in the head, but apparently some ranchers use pentobarbitol. In British Columbia, a cow that had been euthanized with pentobarbitol was left in the open, and 26 eagles were poisoned after eating the carcass. Five of them died. The problem has occurred off and on throughout the United States, with barbiturate toxicosis being a common diagnosis in impaired or dead eagles brought to wildlife rehabilitation centers or forensic labs.
Federal laws make farmers, ranchers and landfill operators legally responsible for wildlife deaths caused by improper disposal of euthanized animal carcasses, but it doesn’t appear that anyone is trying enforce them.
