29/10/2025
WHAT A DIFFERENCE A FEW YEARS CAN MAKE!
In 2019, I attended a hearing of a bill I authored on anticoagulant rodenticides--the first bill introduced to the State House on this topic. Other than myself, only Gary Menin was there to testify in support of the bill.
In 2023, only a couple of months after MK the Eagle died, I attended another hearing to testify on Arlington's Home Rule petition to ban these poisons on private property in our town. Arlington was the only municipality in Massachusetts to have filed a home rule petition on this issue back then.
There was also no state bill proposed to prohibit these rodent poisons as of 2023. Even some advocates on this issue were saying in the wake of MK's death that we were close to a decade away from entertaining the possibility of proposing a ban and having it taken seriously at the state level.
But we rejected that--and made it clear we WANTED a ban.
And look how far we've come in such a short amount of time!
I was so proud and heartened to see that over 100 people were scheduled to testify today at the State House--the vast majority speaking in favor of a statewide prohibition on rodenticides. That there is actually a bill seeking to ban these destructive poisons is in large part because so many municipalities have joined Arlington in filing home rule petitions on this issue. I believe there were about 10 at today's hearing, including for Lexington, Belmont, Newton, Lowell, Brookline, and several others.
It's also because of the initiative of Cape Anne Wildlife in conducting extensive testing of animals that have died in their care that have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that these poisons are inflicting a massive amount of pain and death on our birds of prey.
ENORMOUS THANKS to each and every one of you who testified today and who will be submitting written testimony. It's only through these collaborative efforts that this will pass.
But there's still work to do. The pest control lobby is fighting hard to get this bill watered down. They are spreading misinformation and misquoting papers and research to attempt to pin the overuse of anticoagulant rodenticides on the general public (and in a move that is truly Kafkaesque--actually inverting the findings of reports that find they are the biggest users to project that number elsewhere).
IT IS CRITICAL that we point out in our written testimonies that the actual studies that are available to the public clearly show that pest companies dominate in purchase and use of these poisons.
I will be posting more about that tomorrow and giving a blow by blow analysis of NEPMA's testimony today.
It would be a shame that the scores of us that testified today for environmental justice could be derailed by one 2-person panel from the pest control lobby who was then offered a disproportionate amount of air time toward the end of the hearing--- much more than anyone else who testified today--to essentially give blatantly inaccurate answers to almost everything asked.
