Professional Raccoon Removal
Woodland Humane Raccoon Removal
Raccoons are one of the most common nuisance animals encountered, due to their adaptability and prevalence in many urban areas. If raccoons have invaded your home or your property, it would be a good idea to remove them as soon as possible, as these critters are highly destructive and spread disease. Continue reading to learn more about raccoons and how you can remove them from your property.
What attracts raccoons to a property?
Raccoons are opportunistic and adaptive, and they have made themselves at home living around humans. Since raccoons are always looking for a way to make their life easier, they will always keep their eyes out for easy sources of food and shelter. Many homes and properties are full of enticing food sources. Some common places raccoons will find easy food sources are pet food bowls, unsecured trash cans, and fruit trees. In addition, if rabbits, chickens, geese, ducks, or other fowl or small animals are on your property, raccoons will be more likely to visit.
In addition to the attraction of food, shelter is also very important for these critters. If your home, garage, or another building on your property has entrance points for raccoons, they will be sure to find their way in. Many times, a raccoon that is about to have its young will try to find its way into an attic or anywhere with insulation. Beyond buildings, raccoons also are more likely to make themselves at home if you have any hollow trees, brush piles, areas where debris accumulates, or other features that could double as a warm shelter.
What problems do raccoons cause?
It is very problematic to have raccoons around your property, as they cause significant damage in two main ways: disease and destruction of property. The most serious of these is the disease these critters are capable of spreading. Raccoons carry many different viral and bacterial infections that can be very harmful to humans and their pets. Among the scariest is the raccoon roundworm infection, which can potentially cause death in humans. Rabies is also a serious concern with raccoons, though it can be treated relatively easily. Like other pest animals, raccoons spread their diseases in three major ways. The most direct method of transmission is being scratched or bitten by a raccoon. Another common method of transmission is accidentally contacting a raccoon’s urine, feces, or saliva. Finally, raccoons are able to contaminate food sources very easily if they can find access to them. Since these are very problematic issues, removing raccoons as soon as possible is very important.
Not only do raccoons pose a health hazard, but they also tear up homes and properties with a passion. Raccoons love to create entry points into attics and other parts of homes by chewing through material. If one gets into an attic, it will smash down the insulation, causing your home to be less energy efficient. In addition, raccoons leave droppings everywhere, and can even chew on structural building materials. As can be seen, removing raccoons quickly is important, as the longer, they are there, the more damage will be caused.
How can raccoons be prevented?
Raccoon prevention can be as simple or elaborate as you want to make it. One of the most basic things to do is to decrease the attractiveness of your yard and home to raccoons. One of the simplest ways to begin this process is to keep any pet food and garbage secured and out of reach of critters. In addition, pick up any fallen fruit from fruit trees. To further limit easy food sources, consider cleaning up your yard. Remove any debris piles, brush piles, or tall weeds. This can eliminate hiding spots for common critters that raccoons eat. By simply limiting some of these food sources, you can keep raccoons away more easily.
Once your property is looking less attractive to raccoons, you can begin to perform prevention steps on your home. The first step in this process is to deeply examine the exterior and interior of your home. What you should be looking for are any holes, gaps, or other entry points that would allow critters access to your home. One of the places to examine carefully is the roofline of your home. If there are any concerning problems, you will likely be able to fix them on your own or hire a contractor to fix the problems for you. Once you have made your home less accessible, you will be much less likely to deal with raccoons.
How should raccoons be removed?
Raccoon removal seems like a pretty simple concept, but often it can become problematic. In many cases, there could be just one raccoon that made its way into your home, and this could be easily solved with a baited cage trap. However, one of the common situations that arise is when a pregnant raccoon gets into your home and decides to have her young in your attic. If you end up getting the mother removed, there is a likely chance that her babies will remain up in the attic, and they will die slow deaths and create terrible odors in your home. Since this is a relatively common complication when dealing with raccoons, it is recommended to hire a full-service wildlife removal company to perform raccoon removal. An experienced animal removal specialist will personally ensure that no babies remain in your attic to die, preventing you from having dead animals in your home.
Why hire Woodlands Wildlife Elimination?
Since it is vital to have raccoons removed from your home or property as soon as possible, hiring a full-service wildlife removal company can speed up the process in a big way. Here at Woodlands Wildlife Elimination, our experts have years of experience in dealing with raccoon removals in all kinds of different situations. Not only do we provide affordable, high-quality removal services, but we also offer animal damage repair, wildlife removal, attic restoration, decontamination, and odor removal services as well. If you have a raccoon problem and live in Houston or the surrounding areas, give us a call at Woodlands Wildlife Elimination today!
How to Keep Raccoons Away from Your Garden?
Alongside squirrels, raccoons are some of the most common animals to find their way to someone’s garden. A big part of why animals keep finding their way to a garden is just thanks to the simplicity of stealing food from a garden. If you have one of these food source gardens it should be your priority to learn how to keep raccoons away.
Raccoons can be really annoying when it comes to attacking a garden, although it’s understandably so – these animals scavenge and work for small opportunities to steal food, and a garden is an exponentially better way to steal food, quickly. Nonetheless, we understand your hustle to build that perfect garden too, and we know you need some tips. So, here’s how to keep raccoons away from your garden.
Finding How and Who’s Attacking Your Garden
When it comes to scavengers, there are quite a few that might slowly rotate towards your garden. Whether that means squirrels, opossums, raccoons, or even snakes, depends on the situation and the location. Before you do anything specifically against raccoons, make sure that you’ve either seen one or have seen evidence of one, through paw tracks, droppings, scratches, or more.
Raccoons are pretty similar to the other animals that might find their way to your garden, although there are a few specific ways to counteract them that might not be as easy to use on other animals. Once you’ve confirmed you’re dealing with a raccoon, however, then try to find out how they’re getting to your garden.
If it’s in the middle of an open space, then there’s your problem – leaving a garden just out there means that raccoons can come from any angle and feast on whatever they want. If your garden is tucked away in your yard, then look to see if they climb any fences or have dug underneath a gate. If it’s enclosed, look for holes, gaps, or unlocked spaces. Depending on how a raccoon’s making its way to your garden, things change in responding.
Taking Action
Unfortunately, raccoons are omnivorous, so changing what you’re growing likely won’t affect them that much. If raccoons are greeted with free, easy-to-access food, then they really won’t care what it is. Fortunately, however, there are quite a few other things you can do to chase off any raccoons.
The most conclusive option is to trap your garden off somewhere – whether that means moving some plants inside, building a greenhouse, or enclosing the area in netting, it depends. Whatever way you choose, enclosing a garden is the easiest option with the longest impact. Nonetheless, it’s not the only one.
If you’d rather deal with the raccoons then the garden, then look into investing in locking garbage cans, removing water puddles, tins, or more, keeping food away from the outdoors and locking away extras, placing new fencing, nets, and more, and securing pet food and bird feeders. On top of that, you can install motion-detecting lights to scare off the nocturnal creatures or invest in another way to make them feel uncomfortable.
Some people have said dogs work great to defend your garden, but that’s not very strongly recommended; raccoons are oddly vicious creatures and will gladly injure your dog to fight for food. Plus, they’re potentially disease-ridden, so safety is key above all.
Nonetheless, protecting your garden from raccoons generally comes down to distancing raccoons from your garden. There are some solutions that allow you to put in less effort for around the same return, although the best solution is always in a physical barrier between your garden and any potential eaters. That’s why so many people opt-in for netting or enclosing a garden when given the option.