Rat poison pellets cause alarm at The Dog Shop

Jane Huelle arrived at her Wisconsin Avenue business on Saturday morning to find an unpleasant surprise: in the night, an unknown person had dumped rat poison pellets all along the sidewalk in front of The Dog Shop.

Huelle was immediately concerned—not for her storefront or sidewalk, but, true to her profession, for her customer's best friends. Rat poison, she said, can be extremely dangerous to dogs, and she knows three dogs who have died this year alone from ingesting rat poison—two from Foxhall's Battery Kemble Park and one who lived in Georgetown.

So in response, Huelle spent most of her weekend trying to minimize the collateral damage from the dumping. It took her all day Saturday to clean up the pellets, which had been dropped all along the sidewalk in front of her store and the two neighboring businesses, The Georgetown Café and a hair salon. She filed two separate complaints with the Metropolitan Police Department (putting down poison pellets is illegal) and contacted both the Georgetown BID and the City to make sure that the pellets were not the work of their abatement programs. (They weren't, and the BID has requested increased security around her ).

As for who did it, Huelle said, "I haven't a clue. Honestly, I think it was someone who truly thought they were helping the rat problem."

But for the perpetrator's sake, and for the sake of dog owners, she wants to make sure the issue gets public attention.

"What I want is a PSA letting people know that you can't just put poison out and assume that only rats will eat it," she said. "It's made to taste good. Birds get it, squirrels get it, cats get it, dogs get it, and it's just as lethal to all of those animals as it is to rats."