Safely Home: Service aims to humanely remove animals

Home ownership can carry along with it many worries, from weeds growing in flower beds to leaky plumbing, but another potential worry for homeowners can come from the wild animals that probably inhabited the area long before the house was built. Raccoons in your chimney, bats in your attic, and skunks in your garden can all be frustrating for homeowners, and removing them yourself can be dangerous and ineffective. Many people turn to exterminators or other wildlife-removal services to deal with these new neighbors, but according to wildlife rehabilitator Jennifer Weifenbach, just because a service claims to be "humane," that does not mean that it is true.

Weifenbach and her husband own Statewide Wildlife Rescue, LLC, a company that uses no-kill methods to safely return nuisance wildlife back to nature.

"There is a lot of misinformation out there," she said, "many companies will advertise their service as being 'humane,' but 'humane' doesn't necessarily mean 'no-kill.'"

Wiefenbach said that Connecticut's Department of Environmental Protection asked her and her husband, both licensed wildlife rehabilitators, to train in wildlife removal, because they wanted to be able to refer consumers to a company that would be reliable in not killing wild animals.

"Some companies will tell the customer that they have to kill the animals- but that just isn't true," she said, "If you do the proper exclusion work, the animal doesn't have to die."

The methods that Wiefenbach uses are intended to keep family units intact. "You can't solve the problem by killing an animal," she said pointing to a picture of a baby raccoon, "This is what you also kill when you kill a mother raccoon."

In addition to removing unwanted wild animals from homes, businesses, and boats, Wiefenbach's company also rehabilitates sick and injured animals, and educates other people about how to humanely deal with wildife.

According to Wiefenbach, there are plenty of humane common-sense solutions for keeping wild animals away from your home. Sprinkling cayenne pepper around your garden, for instance, can keep skunks away from your yard and pets. A properly-anchored chimney cap can keep raccoons and bats out of your chimney. Such precautions are effective alternatives to using traps that can kill or maim animals, or pesticides that can have a devastating impact on the entire ecosystem. For example, Rat poison, Wiefenbach said, kills rats, but it can also kill natural predators such as owls after they eat the rats.

"Everything you do has a ripple effect," she said, "If you want to 'go green' you really have to stop with the poisons and the stick traps."

For more information on humane wildlife removal, you can visit State Wildlife Rescue's website at: http://www.statewidewildliferescue.com/ or call 877-5RA-COON.

Raccoon & bat photos courtesy of statewidewildliferescue.com