Skedaddle Safety Tip: How to Handle Baby Raccoons

You hear squealing and funny noises in your attic and when you come up to check it out, you find baby raccoons, four of them, sprawled defenseless without their mother. What should you do in this situation?

While baby raccoons can be one of the cutest things you’ll ever see, do not take them in as pets. Raccoons are hosts to a number of parasites and diseases and can wreak havoc to your property and your vegetation. In short, raccoons need to be in the wild where they belong.

Should you find yourself in this situation, you can do the following steps:

1. Find out if a mother raccoon protects them. Raccoons are nocturnal animals and in this case, the mother raccoon could probably be sleeping during the day while it scavenges for food at night. If you see baby raccoons in your attic, don’t immediately assume that they are abandoned. Observe your attic and check if a mother raccoon is fending for her litter.
2. If the litter is with a mother raccoon, plan its removal immediately. Do not separate them by blocking the mother off their den. Mother raccoons will do everything to get access to its kit and they can be very aggressive. They can rip up your shingles or your roof vents to get to their babies.  It is also not wise to relocate the mother without her young. This could mean starving baby raccoons in your attic. When these baby raccoons die, it poses even bigger problems: bad odor, flies and decaying bodies! It is best to contact professional animal control services like Skedaddle Humane Wildlife Control to relocate the mother raccoon and its babies together.
3. If the litter is abandoned, contact your local department for Natural Resources. It is best to be very careful when handling these baby raccoons as they have the instinct to bite. Raccoons are vector rabies species and they could be carrying rabies.

Professional animal control service providers like Skedaddle Humane Wildlife Control are trained to handle these situations carefully. They can perform a thorough search of your attic and remove all the baby raccoons and relocate them. They are licensed by the government and given instructions on where to safely relocate problem animals.

Skedaddle Humane Wildlife Control has removed thousands of raccoons from almost twenty years of being in the animal control business. Our wildlife technicians are trained to search for raccoons and their litter in the crevices of your attic so that they are removed and relocated to the wild where they belong.