Update: Who Throws a Shoe, Honestly?

Well, this ending wasn't as exciting as I had hoped for.  The "shoe thrower" did do a drive by to stare at the trap hanging off the customer's carport.  During the process we had a friendly neighbor who was helping our company and checking the customer's traps for her.  The "shoe thrower" was scared away by the friendly neighbor who told him to leave the property before she called the cops.  She knew what he was up to.  He was on the stake out for another "shoeicide" I'm sure.  We were able to catch one more animal and the job was closed yesterday.  Oh and by the way, we were trapping raccoons at this house, not squirrels.

Calls are slowing down.  Keep your fingers crossed for our next weirdo...

Who throws a shoe? Honestly...

We have a current customer who is dealing with squirrels in her attic space. She finally got fed up hearing them chase each other around her attic so she did the most reasonable thing, she called our company. I scheduled our technician out to her home to evaluate and set the proper traps to remove the animals. Our squirrel traps are pretty precise. They are "kill type" traps that are very similar to a mouse trap, only bigger, heavier, and are made completely of metal. We put these traps directly over the hole that the animal uses to enter and exit the home. The trap also hangs on the exterior part of the house. This does allow the homeowner to actually see the animal once it is trapped. She was totally fine with that. Unfortunately, through this whole process, she is finding out that her neighbors are not so happy with it.

The actual customer called me last week to tell me that there was an animal in the trap. She said that she was wanting it picked up before the children got home from school and had to walk by her house and see the dangling squirrel. I totally agreed. She then also mentioned that her neighborhood was going against her. They weren't happy with the fact that she was killing these squirrels who were ultimately on a mission to take over her home (okay... that might be a bit of an exaggeration but they could). I told her that we would just have to see how those neighbors feel when it's their turn to have squirrels in their attics. They might change their minds on hating her and hating our company. 

We then got a call over the weekend that there was another squirrel in the trap. Our technician went out and picked up the animal and reset the trap. He then went out yesterday (Monday) morning to check the trap again, just in case. Well, someone did the unthinkable. In the whole 5 years that I've been with the company, I've never seen or heard of this happening. One of these neighbors committed a "shoe-icide". This guy (we know that from the shoe) was so angry about our traps that he sacrificed his own shoe to trip our trap to prevent us from trapping another squirrel (reminds me of one of the best movie quotes ever). Our technician had to go out and remove the shoe and reset our trap. We're currently waiting for the left foot shoe. Our tech could use some new brown shoes... I'll keep ya posted.