Picked up by BBC Scotland lat week, after being aired by the farming press and the trade, it appears that there is a proposal going through the EU parliament to ban certain rat poisons. In the frame are anticoagulant rodenticides - the most widely used group of rat poisons - and in this case the problem stems from an update to the EU's Biocides Directive, legislation introduced more than a decade ago to control the use of chemical substances used to kill living organisms.

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The best laid schemes o' mice an' men

Frau Klass merits a "1984" experience...naked in a cell with a few score famished rodents...blöde Kuh!

Hands up all those who can think of better things to do with rat poison and mentalist MEPs?

Not an expert on such things (not having seen one since I was at school, 3 decades ago), but isn't your photo a gerbil?

There is an easy way to solve the problem - we get the Commission to sample some Anticoagulant Rodenticides. I think Barroso should go first. The parallels between him and a dirty rat are most obvious.

I can't wait to hear what the pest control man who does my farm will have to say about it. His language is colourful at the best of times!

But I reckon this is cause for celebration. This is exactly the sort of idiocy that can do nothing but harm to the European project. It's quite unlike high-fallutin', complicated financial regulations that mean nothing to most people. Here is a measure that will have direct and serious consequences on many, many people's lives.

Right, now it has cooled down, I'm off to spray fungicide on the winter barley - better get a move on before it gets banned too. (Fungicide, not barley.)

Banning barley - I just hope no Eurocrats are around shopping for new ideas. After all the list of things to ban isn't infinite...

I'm not so sure. Farmers routinely have vermin problems, companies often have pest problems and have bait stations positioned about the place, councils have pest problems, but I'd say the amount of rat and mouse poison bought by private individuals is quite small. I think this will be an extra drag on the economy felt as a slight increase in prices by most people, about the same as when anything else which is cheap and effective has been banned. Prices are rising anyway and I doubt the extra caused by banning anti-coagulants will be identified as such. It's not as if anticoagulants are the only form of rat poison, it's just that they are cheap, effective, and well developed.

Surely all the best poisons are poisonous? Time to ban dihydrogen monoxide - it causes all those drownings.

... and relatively safe, compared with the alternatives.

It would be easier if they said - everything is banned unless there's a directive permitting its use.

Seeing as they love banning things, a small envelope listing those permitted will suffice.

Yes, but the fun is in the process of banning ... if you just banned everything outright, you would deprive them of their entertainment.

Or consult paragraphs C54-59 of the 2008 SPS Handbook, which gives us farmers a list of 'permitted activities'!

That's not a Rat, it's a Filligree Siberian Hamster...