"Rat Poison Killing Bobcats And Other Wildlife"

"When a bobcat mother and her kitten curled up together on the UC Santa Cruz campus in early September, the kitten couldn't have known its mother was dying of rat poison. But Duane Titus noticed her lethargy and mangy fur, so he suspected that anticoagulants were making her bleed inside.

"It's really hard to look at that and feel OK as a human knowing that we've probably had a hand in it," said Titus, a wildlife capture specialist with Wildlife Emergency Services, a nonprofit based in Moss Landing.

The bobcat kitten ran off when Titus approached, and the mother died that night. Tests revealed three kinds of rat poison in her body, two of which were "second-generation anticoagulants" -- poisons recently deemed too dangerous for public sale by the state of California and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."

Nala Rogers reports for the Santa Cruz Sentinel January 17, 2015.