Raccoon In the Attic

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What To Do If You Find A Family Of Raccoons In Your Attic, Barn Or Other Buildings
Raccoons used to live primarily in the woods, away from civilization. With uninhabited land growing sparser and man encroaching upon the living quarters of wild animals, raccoons have adapted to living in more populated areas. Even urban homes are not safe any longer from these critters. It is not unusual at all to find that raccoons have moved into human dwellings. They raise their young wherever it is safe and where they can find enough food for them. The easiest food sources and the best protection from predators and the elements are often in attics, sheds or barns.



Find The Entrance
Once you know that you have uninvited houseguests, you need to make sure to find out how they got in. Raccoons generally use the same entrance portal but they do have an emergency exit hole or two. It is necessary that you find all the entrances and exits. Inspect your home or barn or wherever the raccoons set up housekeeping. In your home, look under dormers and under the eaves for openings and slits larger than three inches in circumference. Raccoons have no problem bending soffits to make an entrance. Males will frequently just tear off a loose air vent to gain entry into your attic. If the raccoons live in your shed or barn, the same inspections apply but you may have to do more work to close any possible openings.

Ways To Close Openings
In general, the raccoons can squeeze their way through fairly small holes. Any hole bigger than three inches is a potential portal for them to use. It may be time consuming and tiresome to detect the portal they use most often. Close all holes up except their favorite entrance. Half inch wire mesh is a great raccoon deterrent. You can place the mesh over ripped out vents before you replace the vent. You can also fill in holes by stapling half inch wire mesh over holes and then spraying expanding foam over the mesh. The foam is available in any hardware store and dries into a hard surface. If raccoons are in your barn and you need air circulating under the roof, place wire mesh all along the openings and fasten it tightly with a staple gun. This should close the openings and still permit air to flow.

Get The Raccoons Out
One method to get raccoons out of your attic or barn is to make a lot of noise. Some people have been successful by placing a loudspeaker into the attic and playing rock music at full blast. When the raccoons are irritated enough, they will grab their babies and exit through the only opening that is left to them. Other people have gone so far as to improvise strobe lights in their attic, which drove the raccoon family out as well. A simpler method to get rid of them is to discourage them from staying there with odor. Raccoons have a keen sense of smell. You can make it very uncomfortable to the raccoon’s olfactory system by throwing several ammonia-soaked tennis balls into their living quarters. Rags soaked in ammonia will also work but are not as easy to throw toward the suspected nest.

Did The Raccoons Leave?
There is an easy way to find out if the premises have been vacated. Take some newspaper pages and stuff it into the one entrance you have not sealed off. Make sure the paper is in the opening fairly secure so that it doesn’t fall by itself, then leave. When you check the opening in the morning and the paper has been displaced, the raccoons have moved out. Now is the time to seal that opening as well.

What’s To Stop Them From Returning And Making New Holes?
Place newspaper around every opening you have closed. Pull out your old goggles and rubber gloves. Boil eight ounces of cayenne pepper and five or six habanero chili peppers you have chopped into small pieces. Boil this in enough water to cover the chilies. Let it cool and pour the liquid into a spray bottle. Spray every newspaper in the openings with this concoction. Raccoons do not like the odor and will find a friendlier environment for their family. Don’t forget to remove the sprayed newspaper after about two or three weeks. By then the raccoons will have given up trying to move back in.

Why Did Raccoons Choose To Live In Your Attic, Barn Or Shed?
Something attracted the raccoons to your home or barn. You must ask yourself the question of what did you do to attract them. If you have pets, you may be used to feeding them their dinner on your porch or patio. Whatever the dogs or cats don’t eat won’t go to waste. Raccoons are very happy to take on the role of garbage disposal. Remove all food from outside your home. They will not only dig into pet food. Your trash cans are pantries full of delicacies for them. Most trash can lids do not fit very tightly after they are a few years old. Lids must be tied down securely to deny access to a raccoon. Unless you want more live-in raccoons in your home, be very meticulous about their access to any type of food.

Go back to the main Raccoon Removal page for more information about dangers and signs of raccoon in the attic.

How To Get a Raccoon Out of Your Attic: Let’s get straight to the point here - you have an animal in your attic and you think it might be a raccoon. You have already done your research - the animal sounds too large to be something small like a squirrel or an opossum, and it’s not flapping around therefore it can’t be a bat. You’ve had a peek upstairs and you can see the droppings the animal has left behind, and you think you may have found the spot it gained access to your home too - where that vent is on the back wall of your home. It leads right to the chimney breast, and therefore you the think the raccoon made its way through there.

Ideally, the next step you’re going to want to take is to call up a professional wild animal expert that can assess the situation further. You might think you have a rogue raccoon up there in your attic, but it could be a number of other animals, and the expert is just that - an expert at checking the signs.

Not just setting up traps to effectively and SAFELY remove the raccoon from your house, the expert will know what to look out for when it comes to entrance and exit points, and they will also have a great idea of where the animal can be relocated, knowledge you probably won’t have. Just one example of how this mission could fail for you - if you don’t take the raccoon far enough away (ten to fifteen miles), it will come back with a vengeance.

There are lots of things that a professional will be able to do that you won’t. Most of this comes with experience and knowledge of course. Knowing that repellants don’t work, for example, or understanding the legalities involved with removing wild animals from residential properties. Before you get too involved in your mission to get a raccoon out of your attic, you should probably be aware that in most states, it is illegal to trap a raccoon, and in more states, it is illegal to kill them without the proper license and intentions. In fact, there is no need to kill the raccoon at all, so this shouldn’t even be a factor when you are researching methods to get a raccoon out of your attic.

If you are adamant that you can do this seemingly impossible task yourself, you will need to have a few things to hand. Luckily, we have prepared you a shopping list:

1. Thick, heavy-duty gloves
2. Large enough trap to catch the raccoon (can weigh in excess of 20 pounds)*
3. Food / material to use as bait
4. Heavy-duty enzyme cleaner**

*You will need the trap to be about 12x12x36. **Heavy-duty cleaner to remove urine and feces, which carry a fungus spore that can cause a dangerous disease called histoplasmosis.

You will also need to be prepared to repair any damage to your home, as well as block up any holes or crevices the raccoon could be using as an entrance / exit point from your home.

Before you start ordering any eviction notices for these animals, you should check the laws in your state. You may find that it is illegal to trap or kill a raccoon that has been found in your attic, and the last thing you will want is to get into trouble just because you didn’t do your research first.

The next thing to remember is that a raccoon will rarely enter your home for no reason, and usually it will be a female raccoon looking for somewhere to keep her young safe. This means that as well as ensuring you get rid of the mother, you will need to take every step to make sure her young are removed too. The mother is not going to make this an easy task, and her sharp teeth and claws will be no match for poor, thin gloves. Then you have the rabies risk to worry about. Ideally, you are going to want to avoid coming into contact with the raccoon, leaving it down to the professionals.

Once you’re sure all babies have been removed, if you’ve even managed to find them, it’s time to put the traps down to the mother raccoon and again, this is going to take some figuring out. The trap needs to be along a route that the raccoon would naturally take otherwise there’s a good chance it won’t find it. Why would it worry about that small piece of dog food in that trap when there is a whole kitchen full of food waiting for it inside? Think about it logically. You’ll need to hide it a little bit too - if it looks like a trap, there’s a good chance the animal won’t go near it. Would you?

Trapping the animal will normally take a long time, especially if you are inexperienced, and you’ll find that you catch everything BUT the raccoon in question for a while. You might catch a stray bat in the thin wire of the cage, or even the next door neighbors cat. It’ll be frustrating, and you will need to remember to check it regularly to avoid a decomposing animal situation.

There’s a lesson here - your first step to removing a raccoon from your attic / home, is to always call in a professional!