- We never thought squirrels would turn into the stuff of horror movies.
Michelle Collins lives in constant fear — and she’s done so for the past three years. She is afraid to go into her own kitchen because her home is full of ravenous beasts.
They consume everything in her house, from doors to cabinets and her dogs’ food. She can hear them skittering and scratching, especially at night.
They’re in her ceiling, in her walls, everywhere. They’re squirrels.
Collins, 39, lives in Kilwinning, Scotland. It’s one of the Scottish regions that for years has been under the merciless assault of gray squirrels.
“I live near woodland and they jump off the trees, onto my carport, and then onto my house,” Collins told the BBC.
“There is a hole where they have dug under my porch and are coming up the inside of my walls.”
The squirrels have caused immense damage to Collins’ home. They keep chewing through her doors to get to different areas of the home and eat anything they can find.
Collins used to keep her dogs’ food in her sunroom, but the squirrels ate it. She blocked the holes they made with towels and the squirrels ate the towels — and the new food.
“I never imagined squirrels could do this to my home, it’s unbelievable what they can do. I’ve tried everything but nothing is working. I feel terrorized by them,” Collins said.
“I’m terrified to go into my kitchen every morning.”
‘The Scratching Sound is Terrible’
Collins isn’t the only person in Scotland dealing with the marauding rodents. It seems they’re everywhere and firmly in control.
Jacqueline Hewitt lives in Edinburgh. The 49-year-old said she is constantly haunted by nightmarish scratching coming from her attic and walls.
She has called a pest controller, but their best efforts have failed miserably.
“He put down nine trays of poison and they were all eaten when he checked two weeks later,” said Hewitt.
There are two possibilities here. Either the squirrels are immune to poison — or there are so many of them that killing a dozen just doesn’t matter.
“My daughter has been having nightmares that they are in her bed and she thinks they are going to come through the walls. The scratching sound is terrible,” Hewitt Lamented.
Alayne Costello, also from Edinburgh, unwillingly shares her home with squirrels. She says they’ve been a problem ever since she moved in a year ago.
The squirrels chewed through the frame of the skylights in Costello’s attic. When a storm hit last Christmas, there was nothing to stop the pouring water from flooding in.
“All the insulation was soaked. The wall in my hall was damaged, as well as my bathroom. It has been a nightmare,” she said.
‘They Tried to Claw and Bite Me’
Pest controllers understand the stress homeowners go through due to squirrel infestations. Scott McIntyre, who provides pest control services in Edinburgh, said he’s seen first-hand the horrible damage the rodents can do.
“What they can do to a house can be devastating. The worst was a woman in Fife who had every electrical cable chewed, so she had to have her whole house rewired. The damage they caused cost $37,000,” said McIntyre.
Unfortunately, the law binds pest controllers’ hands. They are not allowed to do anything to squirrels found outside of homes.
They can only start trapping and killing the squirrels once they’ve entered attics or other indoor spaces. But at that point, they’re probably already dug in deep enough that getting them out is extremely difficult.
Not only that, the squirrels are irate and can get violent. McIntyre details an occasion when the tiny beasts attacked him.
His usual method is to scare the squirrels out of the house and then block the holes they use to crawl in. But this time, the three male squirrels he’d cornered decided they weren’t going down without a fight.
“Usually squirrels run away when I go into attics. But they jumped on me and tried to claw and bite me,” he said.
Whoever thought squirrels out of all animals could become such a menace?
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