All Squirrels Must Die!

What a Cute Little Squirrel. Is It Dead Yet?

At last, an answer to my prayers — a web site that tells the truth about squirrels! Now I know for sure, there must be a God! For years I have toiled, practically all alone, with the knowledge about the true demonic nature of these misbegotten beasts. For years I have tried in vain to reveal to my intimates the true reality behind that fuzzy tail and nuzzley puss of these rodent ratty runts. “Rats with furry tails,” I tell everybody. But to no avail. People smile back at me condescendingly, give me that “all-knowing” look, and go off on their own, flipping nuts and acorns in the general direction of these furry marauders of attics and garages.

But NOW we have a breakthrough — a web site that spells the beginning of the end of the Squirrel Revolution as we know it. You are to be congratulated and given a number in line for some kind of Nobel Peace Award for your perceptive and, indeed, redemptive revelations about the Menace upon Humankind being perpetrated by these denizens of the dark. Good luck to all of you! May all of your road kill be of the species named Sciuridae.

Let me tell you of my personal experiences that led me to understand why squirrels are expendable…

Like most folks, I grew up with a certain space in my soul open wide to the existence of these tree-rats. As a kid I’d go over to St. Mary’s Park in the south Bronx and wonder at the busyness, the industriousness of their creepy ways. I soon learned why people used the expression, “squirreling away” something for the winter. These tiny pseudo-nifty little things would run and scamper and stop and hip-hop and suddenly stumble upon two or three acorns and chomp down a few and then bury the remainder. I can confess now that in the naïve unconsciousness of my youth I probably even nodded in their general direction once or twice and considered them cute, especially when they chased after each other and tried to chew on parts of their brothers and sisters.

Many years later I once came upon a dead rat floating in my swimming pool after a winter of weathering. It had no fur left and was totally pink and had a long pink tail. It was bloated and was as ugly as sin. Shows you what a good fur coat can disguise!

Have you ever heard the rackety chatter that squirrels yak-yak at a cat prowling nearby? First off, the squirrels place themselves safely out of the cat’s range, like on an overhead branch. And then they start in. They’ve got their teeth flared and their tails snapping and then all this chatter comes flying out of their mouths very harsh and nasty — full of street curses, foul insults and rather raw invective, not something you’d ever want young children to be exposed to. All sibilant and sneery. So much for their cutesy image.

What comes out of their mouths like this should tell you they’re not far from their garbage-eating ratty cousins across the Hudson who infest New York City to the tune of 8 million rats. Can you imagine that? Under favorable conditions, two rats can make 160,000 rats in only one year! New York City has one rat for every person! You know how everybody is supposed to have their own guardian angel? Well in New York everybody’s got their own Guardian Rat! And now that I live in the ’burbs, I’m afraid to admit it but I’m beginning to believe everybody out here must have their own Guardian Squirrel, there’s so many of them out here! How else would explain their epidemic numbers?

Maybe we shouldn’t call them Guardian Rats and Squirrels. Maybe they’re more like Haunting Rats and Squirrels. Everybody’s got their own Haunters. But I digress. Let me get back to telling you how I became enlightened on the diabolical nature of these fuzzy-tailed rats…

You see, I live in a house with two oak trees on the front lawn. Not one oak tree, mind you, but two — two big beautiful hundred-year-old high-flying oaks that make thousands of acorns every fall. To the squirrels, these oak trees are like a five-star restaurant. So they took up temporary residence high up in the upper branches. But after a few winters, the squirrels must have gotten together and had a meeting and decided that if they could eat in five-star restaurants, then why in the world couldn’t they take up residence in the five-star hotel right nearby?

Nature conspired with THEM against me. When my wife and I arrived back from a visit to my brother’s place in Canada, we were met with the lovely vision of a large tree branch decorating the front of our house. The branch had slashed right through our front gable and was leaning there for all the world like a special squirrel ladder, like they needed this kind of help. After taking care of the Kodak moment for our insurance, I had the house patched back up and wondered aloud if we had picked up any visitors during the open branch surgery on our roof. Sure enough. You know, it’s much easier to gnaw an opening from inside a house than from the outside. Why do I say that? From the inside you can see the light popping through any incipient openings, so you know the easiest and weakest places to gnaw.

So they gnawed and gnawed and eventually their efforts paid off and they moved their whole extended family into the penthouse apartment of the five-star hotel — my attic. They made a hole that served as a front door in my front eve and another hole for the side door in my side eve.

My wife and I would be watching TV in the den when the squirrels would decide to slide down the walls opposite to where we were sitting in the den itself and proceed to entertain us with some X-rated family-making that was noisier and squeakier than anything they even show on cable these days. In your face, as they say. Good thing our daughters were off to college! I’d bang on the walls, they’d halt their fun for a half-minute or so, and then take up right where they left off.

Later on at night the squirrels would squiggle their way up inside the walls to our bedroom on the second floor, where they would switch their entertainment and play scamper games like ringaleavio and hide-and-seek till they were tired enough to go off to sleep.

In the morning the mice, I mean rats, I mean squirrels, would get up at the crack of dawn — which is against my religion. In fact, in my religion, waking up at dawn is as godless as you can get, unless you just happen to still be up from the night before and then it becomes just about as virtuous as you can get.

The squirrels would enter the new day through the hole in my front eve just outside my bedroom window. Every morning without fail they’d play games of poke-out and squeeze-in from 5 a.m. to about 6. I’d get up and stare at them making a ruckus not six feet away from where I was standing with evil intentions growing rapidly in my hardening heart.

So I decided to catch them. And I did! I placed traps next to their front entrance eve. I put peanut butter on a cracker and stuck it way back in the rear of the trap. They’d step on the tripper and Slam! the trap door would shut behind them. Right away I caught two squirrels this way. In the old days of the first Squirrel Invasion of my house about seven years ago, I took the trouble to take the squirrels I’d caged and drive them over two rivers and then open the cage and let them go in some parking lot at least three miles away. Squirrels are said to have strong homing instincts so you have to put some obstacles in their way or else they’ll practically beat you home. You’re driving the circuitous highways and they’re taking the direct overhead tree-flying route. Before you’re out of your car they’re back up there on a branch giving you the same chatter-razzing they reserve for their most hated cats.

But this time around I had no more patience left for squirrels. And I had also come to have a sneaking suspicion, if not the outright clear-headed realization, that the present generation of squirrels might have descended from some of the squirrels that I had earlier removed beyond two rivers. Something about the boldness and tenacity of the new breed seemed to suggest that they thought they had more of a right to live in this house than we did. It was as if they believed that I had illegally evicted their parents and grandparents and they had returned to claim prior squatting rights and now they were going to force the issue. It was us or them. They’d harass us so badly that we’d have to leave our own house. It seems to me I’ve seen a few movies with this theme, about how renters or freeloaders make the house unlivable for the owners. It’s not a nice picture. It’s not good for the dream life either, needless to say.

This time I decided that if this family of squirrels wanted such a high life of eating in a five-star restaurant and living rent-free in a five-star hotel, I was going to go the extra mile and give them something to drink, to wash down their acorns as it were. I’d treat them to my five-star Irish bar and give them as much as they could ever want to drink, too much to drink, in fact, and see if they could “hold their drink,” as they say in the Irish pubs.

So I filled a three-foot high 30-gallon plastic trash bin with about 25 gallons of water and lowered the encaged squirrel into the water. Squirrels, it turns out, can’t hold their breath that long. About 50 seconds is all it takes to begin the process of returning them to protoplasm.

I confess I was a little hesitant after this first dunking. I called up the town police and asked if I caught a squirrel, was it against the law to kill it. “Hah?” Do I have to catch it and let it loose alive somewhere else? “Maybe you’d better call up the ASPCA.” So I dialed them. “Why don’t you call the Animal Shelter,” they told me. I said a squirrel isn’t exactly somebody’s cat or dog. So I called up the Animal Shelter. No answer — it was Rosh Hashanah, the tape said.

So the next day I got my second squirrel and once again tried the Water Dispatch Method, but this time I no longer looked over my shoulder or into my conscience as to whether I was doing right or not. That night the rest of the squirrel family decided to throw an all-night party just to show me what they could do to a man’s so-called right to a good night’s sleep in his own house.

The next two days were ridiculous. These show-offs showed me all right. They tiptoed in and around the tripper and ate all the peanut butter they desired to their hearts’ content. I went out and got another jar of Skippy’s and this time decided, no more crackers, and I smashed the Skippy’s up against a whole slice of bread and slipped the bread right under the tripper so that THEY would have to trip the door. Next morning at five I was awakened by my next catch. This was a big son of a rodent. He proceeded to bang around in the cage so much for so long that I had to get up at 5:30 in the morning, pull the ladder out of the garage and climb up and remove him to the ground where I could come back after I got my sleep and give him a full taste of the original Atkins Water Diet.

The next few days got hairier still. These buggers proved so deft in their movements that they would climb into the cage, remove the bread from under the tripper, drag it out of the cage, lick all the Skippy’s off the bread and then leave the naked bread there for me to see how neatly they ate and would I please leave a napkin for them for the next time, if I didn’t mind.

I was getting desperate. I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in close to a week. I was supposed to be on a mini-vacation to get a proposal done but I had somehow inherited this full-time job of squirrel-trapper in my off-hours. I would not be daunted. I had my house to save. They were now working on a rear-entrance door at the back eaves of my house. How many holes could I have in one house and still keep the roof on?

I got the bright idea to tie a wire onto the cage and I stretched the wire up through my bedroom window and connected it to the radiator. The next morning when I heard them tiptoeing into the cage I slipped out of bed, checked to see the squirrel in the cage, and YANKED the wire with a big tug and Snap! The cage was shut, the prey locked in. This even bigger squirrel jumped so fiercely that the racket was maddening. But now that I was a hardened trapper, I coolly lifted the cage with the wire and let it descend free-fall and hang in the air till I was going to be good and ready to get up from my sleep and have breakfast and then take care of the squirrel business in my own good time.

I think it was about eleven in the morning when I paid a visit to my houseguest who so much liked to hang around. Immediately he let me know he did not appreciate dangling like this for the past six hours. His nerves were quite frazzled, he chattered at me through flaring teeth and claws clenching against the sides of the cage. By now he had tried every angle of his new home. He showed me how fast he could traverse every nook and cranny. He showed me how he could bite the steel but not penetrate it. He showed me how his teeth would work quite fine on my skin though. He had had a dreadful morning and was feeling quite beleaguered. It was all my fault. He dared me to get closer to him.

As he saw me filling up the tub with water he gave me a few last pieces of his mind, punctuating it all with a rage of snarls. He was not praising my ancestors or my lineage. He was fed up and was not going to take it any more. I actually gritted my teeth back at him and snarled back at him. “GRRR!” I said in my best English with my eyes glaring as fiercely as I could make them. I even taunted him with a small branch. There I was, standing on my front lawn, behaving just like a ratty squirrel! Believe me, it’s really nasty.

I thought for sure he was the last. But there was one more that came later that day. Five in all. Interesting family. A season later another family entered my garage. I wired it up and shut them out. Didn’t need the water treatment this time. The garage got so hot in the summer, they’d leave it during the day and that’s when we wired them out.

Let me tell you something. Believe it or not, I’m a pacifist and all that. I belong to the St. Francis of Assisi School of Kindness to Animals. I wouldn’t shoot the most dangerous deer or the grousiest grouse or whatever. I’m a card-carrying member of the Don’t Swat a Fly If You Can Shoo Him Away First Society. But as I’ve related here, I’ve learned to draw the line at the demon monster squirrels. They made me do it. They brought out an animalism in me that no other animal ever could. Like Flip Wilson used to say, “The devil made me do it!” But in this instance the devil’s got a fuzzy, furry tail.

But still I feel it is my journalistic duty to relate the following anecdotes out of some kind of compulsion to establish my objectivity regarding these unruly critters.

I was listening to the car radio some months ago to a program on National Public Radio (NPR). A French woman was asked what her favorite experience on her recent trip to New York was. Without hesitating she said that she discovered the cutest of all animals, the squirrels in Central Park. She loved their tails, their wide eyes and “cute” faces, and the way they stood up and ate acorns. She asked New Yorkers what we called them and all that. She went back to Paris and couldn’t wait to show people the pictures, etc., etc.

Some months before that another woman on NPR, a strong feminist, was saying that Americans were so condescending to Asians when we described their babies as “cute.” “The day we stop calling Asian babies cute,” she hammered home, “would be the day we would show that we can finally accept Asians on their own terms and as equals to us, rather that as some kind of cutesy little things like furry animals.”

So I was in Taipei, Taiwan, earlier this year. A wealthy lady had me and some of my friends up to her mansion for an elegant tea ceremony and twelve-course dim sum dinner. After cocktails I asked her what were her favorite things about America which she visits several times a year. Without hesitation she said she always tells her neighbors about two of the cutest things that America has to offer: squirrels and American babies that look so soft and shiny! Go figure.

Seamus the Mad
New Jersey