Effectiveness of toxic baiting for the control of canines and felines
preprint
OA: closed
CC-BY-NC-4.0
Abstract
Toxic baiting is used for the lethal control of mammalian predators. It is easily applied over large areas and can be highly effective, but also receives significant criticism. We conducted a meta-analysis of the efficacy of lethal baiting for the feral cat, red fox and dingo; our outcome of interest was predator survival. Our dataset contained 125 effects from 35 studies, comprising 1560 individuals tested. Overall, baiting increased the probability of predator death by 36% relative to control plots. However, this effect was stronger (46% increased probability of death) when baits were distributed along tracks relative to across areas (probability of death comparable for baited and unbaited areas). We found no evidence that baiting was more effective at reducing canine relative to feline populations. We additionally found no evidence that Eradicat® achieved greater cat death than other baits. Higher bait densities achieved greater predator knockdown when baits were distributed along tracks, but not when baits were distributed across areas. We found no evidence that repeat bait applications over short periods of time achieve greater population reduction than single bait applications; this was consistent across both design types. Similarly, we found no evidence for an effect of bait matrix (fresh meat, dry processed bait, mixture) for either design type. Our study shows that many accepted baiting practices and perceptions have little empirical support, and are premature given the available sparse evidence. Further, rigorous research is of high priority in this field.
Full text
2,334 characters
· extracted from
oa-doi-fallback
· 2 sections
· click to expand
Abstract
Toxic baiting has been widely adopted for the control of exotic canines and felines. However, high variability in findings make it difficult to gauge the overall efficacy of this control method. We conducted a meta-analysis of the efficacy of baiting for the feral cat, red fox and dingo; our outcome of interest was apparent predator survival. Our dataset contained 121 effects from 34 studies, comprising 1402 individuals tested. When baits were distributed along tracks they increased the risk of predator death by 46% relative to controls. However, when baits were distributed more broadly across areas the risk of predator death was comparable between baited and unbaited areas. We found no evidence that baiting was more effective at reducing canine relative to feline populations. We additionally found no evidence that Eradicat® achieved greater cat death than other baits. Higher bait densities achieved a greater risk of predator death for track baiting, but not area baiting. We found no evidence that repeat bait applications over short periods of time achieve a greater risk of predator death than single bait applications; this was consistent across both design types. Similarly, we found no evidence for an effect of bait matrix (fresh meat, dry processed bait, mixture) for either design type. Our study shows that many accepted baiting practices have little empirical support and are premature given the available sparse evidence. Further, rigorous research is of high priority in this field and will assist in clarifying the use of lethal baiting as a conservation tool.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.32942/X2KP62
Subjects
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Keywords
Lethal, population, Biat, Pest, management, Control
Dates
Published: 2024-04-11 14:20
Last Updated: 2024-11-28 10:42
Older Versions
License
CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Additional Metadata
Conflict of interest statement:
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Data and Code Availability Statement:
All data and analysis scripts will be made available open-source through GitHub after review.
Language:
English
Metrics
Views: 734
Downloads: 1007
Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.
My notes (saved in your browser only)
Ask this paper
Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works
Citation neighborhood (no data yet)
We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2024) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.
Source provenance
- europepmc
- last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00
- unpaywall
- last seen: 2026-05-29T02:00:03.542394+00:00
License: CC-BY-NC-4.0