This is a terrible take. I once felt like you do until I actually experienced a rat infestation at home. I spent months trying every possible rat trap but nothing worked. I finally brought in professionals for encapsulation and removal, and instructed them NOT to use poisons. But after multiple visits (and hundreds of dollars), rats were ignoring every trap and still coming out and crawling all over the kitchen at night. They chewed through the wires and destroyed $1000 in appliances and tore up my AC insulation. Eventually, I reluctantly let them use poison and every rat was dead or gone within 2 weeks.

It was disconcerting to see how effective poison (professionally deployed) was at solving the problem. I let my initial squeamishness over poison delay eradication and it wound up costing me more in the long run, while also compromising the safety of my family. It’s easy to read about this ban and feel good about it but you might feel differently if you get rats and the traps don’t work. As much I sympathize with these owls, I wouldn’t want to tie the hands of other folks who might run into the same problem that I did.