Dudley Grange will host Gary Menin of Raptors are the Solution, who will expose the widespread dangers of your favorite rat poison. Raptors are the Solution is a national organization aiming to eliminate the use of rodenticides. Rodenticides kill by causing internal hemorrhaging, but it’s not restricted to their target mice and rats. All too often, the rat doesn’t die immediately, but escapes to the wild before succumbing and gets eaten by an owl, hawk, dog, cat or some other carnivore. The poison then inflicts the same harm, often including death, on another animal, and there are occasionally even cases of human children finding rat poison pellets and consuming them.

In a Tufts Veterinary Hospital study of four major rodent-eating raptor species admitted there from 2006-10, 86 percent tested positive for anticoagulant rodenticides, and that percentage rose to 96 percent among birds admitted 2012-17. “There are much, much safer and indeed equally effective ways to rid your house or business of the mice, from house cats to ultrasonic repellers to carbon dioxide pellets to fully-automated traps that self-bai and self-clear and self-set after every instantaneous humane kill,” Menin said.

Menin is an engineer by training and experience, has been a physics teacher, and served on the Sterling Board of Health for many years before getting involved with Raptors are the Solution. His free presentation begins at 6 PM in the Senior Center at Dudley Town Hall.

After his talk, the Grange will hold its annual Pound Auction, in which members and visitors bring literally anything weighing a pound in a bag or wrapped as a gift, and people bid on them before seeing them. In the past, gifts have ranged from the edible to the useful to the quirky to the slightly risque, so you never know what you’ll get! All proceeds will be donated to a local charity.