I Lost My Cat Biscuit To Rodent Poison. Now I'll Never Let That Box Into My House Again.

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By Dorothy Hargrove, 71  ·  Henderson, Nevada  ·  Shared with Home & Living

Biscuit used to wait for me at the back door every morning.

Every single morning for eleven years, without fail, he was there.

He is not there anymore.

And I am the one who put the thing in my house that killed him

I want to tell you what happened, because I think there are a lot of people out there using rodent poison right now who don't know what it can do to the other animals living in their home.

 

I didn't know. I had no idea.

 

And I would give anything to go back and know it before that Tuesday in October.

 

The House I've Lived In For Thirty-One Years

 

My name is Dorothy Hargrove. I am 71 years old. I live alone in the house my husband Gerald and I bought in 1993, in a quiet neighborhood outside Henderson, Nevada.

 

Gerald passed in 2018. After that, it was just me and Biscuit.

 

He was an orange tabby. Eleven pounds at his heaviest, according to the vet. He slept at the foot of my bed and sat on the windowsill in the afternoons to watch the birds. He had a purr that sounded like a small motor. When I had my hip replaced in 2022, he stayed on the bed with me for four days straight.

I am not one of those people who calls their pet a child. He was a cat. But he was my companion for eleven years, and my house felt like a home because he was in it.

 

I want you to understand who Biscuit was before I tell you what happened to him.

 

The Droppings Behind The Stove

 

In September of last year I started noticing signs. Small dark grains on the shelf liner under the kitchen sink. A corner of a cereal box gnawed open. I pulled the stove away from the wall one afternoon and found a little pile of droppings in the back corner, behind the gas pipe.

 

My stomach sank.

 

I had never had mice before. Thirty-one years in this house and never once a mouse. But that September was the driest on record here, and I later learned from my neighbor Frank that the whole block was dealing with them coming in from the dry lot behind the houses.

 

I wasn't panicked not at first. I thought this is a problem and I'll fix it.

So I drove to the hardware store and I bought what the man behind the counter recommended.

 

A box of rodent poison bait blocks.

 

"Just put one under the sink and one in the garage," he said. "Works in a few days. Mice eat it, go outside, and that's that."

 

I asked him if it was safe for cats.

 

"Oh, keep him away from the blocks themselves," he said. "He won't be interested anyway it's for mice."

I went home. I put one block in a little tray under the sink with the cabinet door pulled almost shut, the way he showed me. I put another in the corner of the garage.

 

I made sure Biscuit couldn't get to either one.

 

That was the part that still haunts me.

 

I was so careful with the blocks. And it didn't matter at all.

 

The Thing Nobody Told Me At The Counter

 

⚠ What Is Secondary Poisoning?

 

When a mouse eats rodenticide bait, the poison stays active in the mouse's body. If a cat, dog, owl, or hawk then catches and eats that mouse — or even mouths it the predator ingests the poison too. The predator never touched the bait block. It doesn't matter. The dose transfers.

This is called secondary poisoning, and it is documented as one of the leading causes of accidental pet death associated with rodent control.

I did not know this.

 

I did not know that keeping Biscuit away from the bait block was only half of the equation. I did not know that if he caught a mouse that had eaten the poison — something cats do, something they are supposed to do — the poison would move into him.

 

Biscuit was an indoor cat who occasionally caught mice that made it into the house. He had done it twice before that September. I had always thought it was sweet. A small cat doing what cats have done for ten thousand years.

 

What the ASPCA saysRodenticides are consistently among the top toxins reported to the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center. Anticoagulant rodenticides the most common type sold in hardware stores work by preventing blood from clotting. In a secondary poisoning case, symptoms in a cat can take several days to appear, by which point organ damage is often already severe.

 

About two weeks after I put the bait blocks out, the mice were gone. I thought it had worked perfectly.

 

Three days later, Biscuit stopped eating.

 

Tuesday, October 14th

 

He was lethargic on Monday. He wouldn't touch his bowl, which had never happened Biscuit was a good eater his whole life. I told myself he was just having an off day. Cats have off days.

 

On Tuesday morning he was lying on his side in the hallway, breathing in a way that frightened me. I called Dr. Patel's office as soon as they opened. They told me to bring him in right away.

At the clinic, Dr. Patel ran blood work. She came back into the exam room and her face told me before her words did.

 

"Dorothy," she said, "his blood isn't clotting."

 

She asked me if I had used any rodent poison in the house recently.

I felt the floor shift.

 

"I kept him away from it," I said. "I made sure of it."

 

She nodded gently. She explained secondary poisoning to me in that exam room, the way the man at the hardware store never had. She explained that the mouse I never saw Biscuit catch was almost certainly the source. She explained that anticoagulant rodenticides can take days to show symptoms in a cat, which is why it seems to come from nowhere.

 

She explained that by the time symptoms appear, the damage is usually already significant.

 

We tried. She gave him Vitamin K injections, which is the antidote for anticoagulant poisoning. We kept him overnight. I sat in the parking lot of that clinic until they closed and called me to say I could go home.

 

Biscuit died the next morning at 6:42 AM.

 

He was eleven years old.

 

The Part I Can't Let Go Of

People say "it wasn't your fault" and I understand why they say it. They're being kind.

 

But I bought that box. I put those blocks in my house. I did not know what they could do, but I also did not ask enough questions. I trusted the man at the counter and I did not go looking further.

 

For weeks after, I would hear myself start to call him Biscuit, dinnertime before I remembered. I would reach down automatically before bed to move him from the foot of the mattress, where he wasn't.

 

The cat bed is still where he left it. I haven't been able to put it away.

 

I am not writing this for sympathy. I am writing this because I think someone reading it right now has a cat or a dog and a box of rodent poison under their sink, and they think they have been careful the same way I thought I had been careful.

 

I want them to know what careful doesn't cover.

 

What I Found When I Finally Started Looking

 

A few weeks after Biscuit died, my granddaughter Melissa came to stay with me for a weekend. She's 34 and knows her way around the internet better than I do.

She found the mice had started coming back droppings again behind the stove, the same as September. I told her I was not putting any poison in my house again. Not ever. But I didn't know what else to do.

 

"Gran," she said, sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop, "there are repellents that don't use poison at all."

 

She started reading. She showed me product after product. Most of them looked like the same essential oil in different packaging. But one caught her eye and mine.

"This one is EPA-registered as a rodent repellent," Melissa said. "That means they actually had to prove it does something."

 

It was called PestLab™ Rodent Repellent Pouches.

 

No poison. No trap. No bait that any animal could eat.

 

Just a blend of plant oils peppermint, cinnamon, castor oil, cedarwood released slowly from a pouch you place where mice travel. The scent overwhelms a mouse's sense of smell and makes the space too unpleasant to stay in. They don't die. They simply leave.

 

"Nothing in here can hurt a cat," Melissa said, reading the label. "There's nothing in here that can hurt anything except make a rodent uncomfortable."

 

I looked at the ingredient list for a long time.

 

Then I said, "Order them."

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How PestLab™ Pouches Work, Explained Plainly

 

Step 1  Tear open the pouch  No tools, no mixing, no safety precautions. Takes seconds.

Step 2  Place it where mice travel   Under sinks, behind appliances, along baseboards, in garages and sheds.

Step 3  The scent does the work  Mice detect it, find the area uninhabitable, and leave. No poison. No remains.

 

Each pouch contains four plant-based ingredients:

  • Peppermint — a concentrated menthol that overwhelms a rodent's highly sensitive olfactory system
  • Cinnamon — disrupts the scent trails mice use to navigate and communicate
  • Castor oil — a carrier that extends how long the active scents release
  • Cedarwood — a natural deterrent with a long history of use in storage areas

To a person, it smells like a clean linen cupboard. To a mouse, it is a barrier they will not cross.

 

And here is the part that matters most to me now:

 

There is nothing in these pouches that can harm a cat, a dog, a bird, or a child. There is no secondary poisoning risk because there is no poison. A cat can sniff a pouch, bat it across the floor, or carry it in its mouth and nothing will happen to that cat.

 

I wish I had known these existed in September.

 

What Happened In My House After I Used Them

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The pouches arrived three days after Melissa ordered them. I placed them the same afternoon.

 

Under the kitchen sink one beside the drain pipe where I'd seen the most signs.

 

Behind the stove, in the back corner where the first droppings had been.

 

In the garage, near the door to the garden.

 

Along the baseboard of the pantry.

 

The whole house smelled lightly of peppermint. It was not unpleasant. It smelled, I thought, like the kind of thing someone's grandmother might keep in a bowl on a shelf. Which I suppose is exactly what it is.

 

By day four, I stopped finding new droppings.

 

By the end of the first week, the house was quiet in a way it hadn't been since August.

 

No traps to check in the morning. No bait that anything living could accidentally consume. Nothing to be careful of except remembering to replace the pouches when the scent fades which the instructions say is every 30 to 90 days depending on the room.

 

I check them on the first Sunday of every month now. It is a very small task.

The mice have not come back.

 

Why Pet Owners Cannot Afford To Use Poison Bait

 

⚠ Before You Buy Rodent Bait Blocks, Read This

 

The most common rodenticides sold in hardware stores are anticoagulants  they work by preventing blood from clotting. They are designed to be slow-acting so the mouse doesn't associate the bait with feeling ill and stop eating it.

That slow action is exactly what makes secondary poisoning so dangerous for pets. A cat or dog that eats a poisoned mouse may not show symptoms for 3–7 days. By then, the anticoagulant has been in their system long enough to cause internal bleeding that is difficult to reverse.

 

Keeping your pet away from the bait block is not sufficient protection. The risk travels with the mouse.

 

The only way to eliminate the secondary poisoning risk is to eliminate the poison.

That means:

  • No bait blocks
  • No poison pellets
  • No rodenticide in any form

Snap traps are safer for pets than poison a caught mouse cannot transfer anything but they carry their own difficulties for elderly people or anyone who finds handling dead animals distressing. And they do nothing to prevent more mice from entering through the same gaps.

 

A scent repellent like PestLab™ addresses the problem at the point of entry. Mice don't settle where the scent barrier is. They don't need to be caught or killed.

They simply move on to somewhere else.

 

No poison enters your home. No mouse dies inside it. Your pet is safe.

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What PestLab™ Gives You That Poison Never Can1. Zero Secondary Poisoning Risk

 

There is no active toxin in PestLab™ pouches only plant-based essential oils. A mouse that leaves your home after being deterred by the scent carries nothing harmful. Your cat can catch that mouse and be perfectly safe.

 

2. No Dead Animals Inside Your Walls

 

Poison bait works by killing mice often inside the places they've nested, deep inside walls and under floorboards. That decomposing smell can last for weeks. PestLab™ makes treated spaces uninhabitable, so mice leave while they're still alive and healthy. The problem resolves cleanly.

 

3. Safe For Every Member Of The Household

  • Children — plant-based oils, no synthetics or neurotoxins
  • Indoor cats and dogs — nothing toxic, no secondary risk
  • Birds and small pets — no airborne chemicals
  • Livestock and farm animals — suitable for barn and feed-room use

4. Works In Every Space Poison Can't Safely Go

 

Kitchens, pantries, children's rooms, pet areas, anywhere you store food. Any space where placing a rodenticide bait block creates unacceptable risk is a space where PestLab™ is the only reasonable option.

 

5. Preventative, Not Reactive

 

Poison waits for mice to enter and eat. PestLab™ discourages them from settling in the first place. Place the pouches in late summer — before they start looking for winter warmth — and you may not need to deal with an infestation at all.

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With more than 140,000+ 5-star reviews

TrustScore 4.8 144,354 reviews

★★★★★

Margaret T. — Albuquerque, NM

 

I have two dogs and was terrified of using any kind of bait or trap. These pouches were exactly what I needed. Placed them under the kitchen sink and in the laundry room, and within a week the problem was gone. No worry about the dogs getting into something dangerous. I cannot recommend these enough to other pet owners.

 

★★★★★

Robert A. — Flagstaff, AZ

Our barn cat had gotten into rodent poison years ago and we were not going to go through that again. PestLab pouches are the only thing I trust now. We put them in the feed room and the tool shed, and we haven't had a mouse in either space since the spring.

 

★★★★★

Linda K. — Sacramento, CA

I'm 68, live alone, and was not going to deal with traps. These pouches are so simple — you open them, you put them where you've had problems, and they work. My house smells slightly of peppermint and I have not seen a mouse since November. For anyone living alone who just needs this to be easy and safe, this is the answer

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A Note From Dorothy

 

I started this by telling you about Biscuit. I'll end it the same way.

 

I can't undo what happened. I can't get those eleven years back, or the years we might have had left. I've learned to live with the quiet in my house, though some mornings it still surprises me.

 

What I can do is tell other people other pet owners, other people living alone, other people who stood at a hardware store counter and trusted what they were told what I know now.

 

There is a way to deal with mice that does not put the other lives in your house at risk.

 

It works. It smells like a clean cupboard. And it costs about the same as one trip to the hardware store that I will always, always regret.

 

✓ 90-Day Money-Back Guarantee

 

Place the pouches where you've seen activity. If you don't notice a difference within 90 days, contact PestLab at support@pestlab.co for a full refund no questions, no forms, no runaround.

 

Place one where the mice travel. Give it a week. See what happens.

 

Your pets don't need to be part of this equation at all.

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