Raccoon Prevention - Tips to Keep Raccoons Away from Your Property
First, Make Sure You Are Dealing with Raccoons
Raccoon Prevention – All different types of animals may wander through your yard for a number of different reasons. From neighbor’s cats to deer to squirrels to skunks or to even the occasional odd neighbor, raccoons are not the only thing to inhabit the local grounds. You can expect just about anything to wander through. Each type of animal takes different methods to repel. Further, if you are looking to rid your yard of raccoons, some techniques could deter other animals as well.
You could end up scaring your own cat away from your land by mistake. Look for signs of night looting, get a wilderness camera, or watch out a window for these night bandits, aka trash pandas.
Don’t Take One Step, Take A Few To Protect Your Property
Remember that the common raccoon is a highly intelligent and highly cunning creature that can often outwit even the most intelligent home defences. So, when you are looking to protect your land you will want to invest in 2 or 3 or 4 of the following techniques.
1) Secure Your Trash
Open or easy to open trashcans are primary targets for trash pandas. Raccoons love the access to plentiful food and the variety of the diet available in trashcans. Further, trashcans contain more than a night’s amount of food for even the fattest of raccoons. The best way to keep raccoons away from your property is to keep the food away from their little hands. Bungy cords, lockable lids, and many other types of ties can keep the lids secured and their hands out.
3) Seal Up Any Holes in Your Home or Shed
Raccoons in urban and suburban areas don’t just need food, they also need a home. Raccoons often look for homes in woods where there are nice dens in fallen trees. However, absent these wooded areas, sheds, attics, garages, crawlspaces, and below porches do just as well for comfortable, warm, quiet, and secure homes to raise babies. If you want to keep raccoons off of your property try making sure there are no food sources and no places to create a nest.
5) Use A Chemical Deterrent
There are many varieties of chemical deterrents that can be used to keep raccoons away from your property. It is important to note a few items. First, these deterrents are broader than just raccoons. Often, they will deter more than just raccoons. They could deter many small mammals walking through the area. Second, these chemical deterrents need to be non-toxic. There are rules against using toxic chemicals in many jurisdictions due to the possibility of ingestion by household animals or small children. So, make sure the liquid or pellet deterrents are non-toxic and are liberally applied all over the grounds.
2) Get Rid of Any Outdoor Food
Often people love to feed their animals outdoors. This could be in the form of cat food, dog food, or chicken food for the local characters wandering the neighbourhood. As nice as you can be to care for the local stray cats and dogs, you can attract other types of varmints like rats, skunks, and raccoons. Similar to securing the trashcans, the best way to keep raccoons out of your yard is to remove the availability of food for the local riffraff.
4) Make Sure You Protect Your Garden
You may think that raccoons are only looking for trash food and leftovers, but they are scavengers of the highest caliber. This means that if you have free food in vegetable form, they are likely to have a field day, literally. Your vegetable garden may be visited by night bandits when the vegetables get ripe. So, protection with a wire fence is necessary to protect your hard-earned produce.
6) Use A Mechanical Deterrent
Mechanical deterrents are great to keep critters off your land during specified periods of the day and from specific directions. Mechanical deterrents can either be visual, auditory, or physical. Visual deterrents are bright lights, scarecrows, or predator decoys. These can be placed in areas that the raccoons frequent often. Auditory deterrents are loud and very high-pitched sounds that are triggered when something passes by a motion sensor. The sensors are spaced to cover any access point to the property. Physical deterrents are motion activated sprinklers directed at the animals when they enter the grounds. The spray of the water will scare the animals off when they trigger the motion sensor. Properly placed sprinklers can double as a watering system for a yard.
5) Trap Them & Relocate
The last course of action if you can’t keep the raccoons off of the property is to trap them and relocate them. You can use a metal wire trigger trap that is baited with food. It will close behind the animal as it walks through the cage and across the level that closes the door.
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