I wonder the same thing about roaches and dogs. If a dog eats a roach that's eaten poison, how bad is that?

I have heard of falcons dying from eating poisoned pigeons or squirrels. The size differential there isn't quite as much as a rat-->cat, although I've seen some pretty big rats.

I have always assumed that my cat or dog could get seriously ill or die if they ate a poisoned rat or mouse, so I just try to avoid poison as vermin control.

I don't have a cat and there are very few wandering around the neighborhood but there are racoons aplenty. Which probably explains the lack of cats.

To be able to answer your hypothetical question correctly, I need to now what kind of poison was used on the rat.

(If you cat just ate a rat with poison, you might want to consult a vet about where to get K-vitamin which is the antidote against the most commonly used rat poisons over in this country anyway)

That was my attempt at dry humor which I see now didn't come out funny at all. Trying to be stonefaced just doesn't work in text.

We feed the rats to the cats and the cats to the rats and get the cat skins for nothing.

I put out some of those yummy mice & rat death-cookies. "Out" in this case is in my detached shed. No openings large enough for felines or racoons.

One rat down, n to go, but one of them tried to make it all the way up my driveway before collapsing. Got me wondering what might happen if some other critter had gotten to it before I could dispose of the corpse?

I wonder if there is a "died badly" smell that animals can detect so they stay away?

I believe there is, trinity8-director. We have stray cats that eat all number of birds and squirrels, from what I can see, but we still have the occasional squirrel carcass that just sits there until I notice it a week later doing yardwork, and it doesn't seem to have been touched.

I assume these are old or diseased squirrels that couldn't make their last jump. But the cats seem to know not to eat the corpse.

To some degree it's a problem of bioaccumulation. Some poisons aren't flushed from the body. So if a cat eats one rat that has eaten poison, and the cat's mass is sufficiently larger than the rat's mass that the poison doesn't reach toxic levels, the cat will probably survive by flushing the poison out gradually through its filtering systems.

But if the poison bioaccumulates, and the cat's systems can't flush the poision rapidly enough, then as the cat continues to eat more poisoned rats, it will eventually harbor enough poison to bring about its own death.

This is a huge problem in fisheries and seafood, because before actually dying of the poisons themselves, fish get eaten by bigger predator fish and the poison (things like mercury that are dangerous to humans) just migrates up the food chain...bioaccumulating in some our favorite fish, like tuna and sword. The doses of poison in those fish are quite large, as they've been biomagnified.

Biomagnification was the major factor in the DDT threat to eagles, which is why eagles were placed on the endangered list.