There are a few ways in which you could approach removing an unwanted visitor, such as the humble raccoon, from your property. Ideally, you’ll want to call in a wildlife control professional to do the job for you as anyone will tell you will know, getting rid of an animal that doesn’t want to be gotten rid of is a pretty difficult task.

If the raccoon is in your house, it already has everything that it needs so it won’t give it up without a fight. It has a steady source of food, either from the dog food you leave on the back porch overnight, or with the leftovers that you thought you’d covered on the kitchen side. And your garbage can on the back patio - wild critters love to rummage through it in the middle of the night, or even the middle of the day, to see the tasty delights you see as unfit for human consumption. It might not be to your taste, but to a scavenger like the raccoon, it is exactly their taste.

Some people use this point to their advantage and leave food scattered around with poison hidden within it. This isn’t exactly the best way to deal with the animal but it is one way. The thing you need to know about this is that in most states, it’s illegal, and you’re going to need a serious amount of poison to kill an animal like the raccoon, which can grow to the same size as a medium sized dog. Plus what are you going to do after the raccoon has died, if you can even find it? Burn it? Bury it? What about the threat of disease? Do you have heavy duty gloves? Chemical cleaners? Because it’s not just the animal itself you’ll need to worry about here, it’s the infested bedding on top of the waste material the animal leaves behind. It’s not pretty and in some cases, it can even dangerous.



Repellents are just as useless as poison as far as getting rid of a raccoon is concerned. In fact, one of the only successful ways to evict your unwanted house visitor is with a trap and release system. Again, as many that has tried this will know, it’s not an easy task and is probably best left to the professionals.

There are a lot of things to think about here - what size trap will you need? What kind of trap are you going to use? Live cage traps are the humane, preferred choice but what are you going to do once you have caught the animal? And what happens if there are babies left behind? If you don’t take them far enough away, they’ll come back. And if you haven’t completed out the repair mission fully, they’ll get back in too. In fact, that’s just one more thing for you to consider with removing a raccoon from your house - the repair mission.

The raccoon found its way into your house, and you’re going to need to find out how. If you don’t repair the hole, it could come back, and so could a whole host of other wild animals, all of which will be just as annoying as your raccoon and in some cases, even more so. Would you really want a house filled with rats? Or an attic full of bats?

You’ll need to make sure that you repair any damage or holes / cracks with the right material too. Raccoons have very sharp teeth and claws that will make mincemeat out of most materials, including human flesh which is why you’ll want to keep your distance. If you repair a vent with a material that isn’t quite strong enough, the claws will tear right through it and you’ll be right back to square one. All of your hard work will have been in vain.

By far the best way to deal with this situation is to do some research on your local wildlife control professionals who will be able to take care of everything - finding the animal and any potential babies, removing them, relocating them, cleaning up, and even repairing. A great expert will even give you information on how you can better protect yourself and your home in the future too, giving you a much better chance of a successful animal eviction. Plus, by the time you’ve wasted all your money on repellants that didn’t work, or poisons that killed everything but the raccoon, you’ll have wished you called up on the help of a professional anyway!

To learn more about our services, visit the Nashville wildlife removal home page.