All Squirrels Must Die!

Subject: Stupid squirrel screwed up my new car

In early April of 2006, it was cold, overcast and rainy at noon when I went to lunch from work.  The relatively new (6 months old) metallic gray Toyota Camry SE V6 that I had come to delight in was purring like a kitten.  That evening, I decided to work late, until 7:30 p.m., and went to the parking lot in a light drizzle, noticing that all the other employees cars were gone.

I started up the car and begin to head for home. In only a minute or two, I started seeing steam coming from the engine compartment, and it sounded like the V6 was only hitting on half the cylinders! A few minutes later, I found a side road and pulled off to check it out. It was a new car and should not be having this kind of problem.

Squirrel damage to Toyota Camry SE

I opened the hood, and suddenly saw the problem: a big gray squirrel had crawled up inside the engine compartment, torn off a substantial portion of the padded insulation on the underside of the hood, chewed through two copper spark plug wires, several vacuum hoses, and had started making a bed on my engine block, all in the space of 6-7 hours! See the attached photos.

The offending varmint was caught red-handed when I opened the hood, and glared at me as I yelled and cursed and swung at him with whatever I had in hand. In a moment he jumped out of the car and disappeared into the mist, leaving me with a screwed up car and a stinking bill to fix it of $254.48. How I wished I had a baseball bat to swing at him, or a pocket rocket slingshot with some nice ball bearing loads!

Squirrels are totally destructive and brazen animals, rodents at best. No, they aspire to be rodents!

— Dan in Calif.