I need help, quickly! There’s a huge honkin’ opossom in the laundry room, and its wedged itself behind the furnace. It can move around, but I can’t get back there to get it, and frankly, the farther I can stay away from it and still get it the hell out of the house the better. I’ve done a little research online, and apparently, they like sardines and hate fox urine. Since I have neither on hand at the moment and it’s getting late, I was hoping somebody out there had an idea.
Help me please! I’ve got goose bumps and I’m itchy ever since I saw those two beady eyes staring out from behind the furnace. I don’t really want to kill this thing, but I want it out for good. I’ve lived in Jersey my entire life and never before have a seen a critter the size of a small dog in my laundry room. EEEWWW!
Is there a door directly to the outside from the laundry room? Do you know how it got in? If there is a door, I would open it. Oppossums are most active at night, if he makes a break for it you can shut the door after he leaves. If he got in a different way and that route is still open, though, you might have the same problem tomorrow.
You’re best bet is probably to call animal control, or failing that, the police (who probably have a contact they can call). No sense risking getting bitten by a rabid possum.
I think he’s coming in from under the house. He’s gotten in twice before and we’ve mangaged to scare him out with a broom, but the opossom wrangler’s working, and I’m just not sure I can do it without freaking out and accidentally beating this thing to death. We may have made our problem worse by boarding up the crawlspace under the house. That can be fixed in the morning if we need to, but in the meantime, my skin’s crawling.
We tried animal control and were told “We don’t do opossoms.” What the hell are they doing with our tax dollars if not saving creeped out citizens from marsupals?
We tried animal control and were told “We don’t do opossoms.” What the hell are they doing with our tax dollars if not saving creeped out citizens from marsupals?
What are they, dog trainers? Tell them it’s a raccoon. Keep changing the animal until they decide that it IS there job to control animals, including wild ones.
Casey1505, they said they’d come for a raccoon, but not for a opossom. Wha’ts the difference, a bushy tail and some bad eye shadow? I’m afiraid if I tell them it’s a raccoon and they arrie to find a opossom, they’ll tell me in person they don’t do opossoms and leave and I’ll be stuck in the same boat.
where do you live? the difference might be that raccoons are native while ‘possums are invasive exotics (that would be the case here, for instance.) ‘Course, that’s pretty academic; you’d think animal control’s job would still be to control animals…
Who was this ``animal control’’ you called anyway? I don’t meant that quite as stupidly as it came out. Here, there’s independent companies, the city pound, and the SPCA, and various separate wildlife rehab organisations.
These would all have separate mandates; some of the rehab organisations, for instance, would refuse to deal with invasives because their mandate is framed in terms of naturalness and stability of an ecosystem in some way, whereas say the SPCA’s mandate would be to prevent animal suffering, which is what you are aiming for.
Look in the yellow pages (or online) for pest control in your area (like exterminators). Many of these folks will deal with racoons, oppossums, skunks and the like. I would advise against doing it yourself with the broom.
Or tough love: jab him hard a few times with the handle of the broom (hard enough to probably bruise) and he will play dead.
Then hook him out of there with whatever will reach (he will seem VERY dead for half-an-hour), push his apparent carcass into a box if you don’t want to touch him, and dump him far outdoors.
Then check for any possible entrance cracks and fill them with generous amounts of steel wool, from the hardware store’s painting-and-refinishing department. Get smaller holes too if you want to discourage rats or mice from entering.
Once this is done, go back to where you dumped his dead body, and amazingly enough it has vanished. If you had strewed flour around his body, you will see little ghost possum tracks leading away.
Whatever you do, do not corner it. I was in a tussle with a cornered opposum once and I was seriously overmatched. It was attacking my sisters rabbit hutch and I tried to poke it off the cage with a broom. Big mistake. They have large teeth, exotic diseases and claws.
I was fourteen and screeching like a sissy boy as it backed me into a corner. My dad had to save me with his golf club. Gave it a whack and it only bothered it enough to make it saunter away. I would call the pest control people.
Broom poking has been tried and it only made my opposum very churlish.
Virginia opossum = Didelphis virginianus = common 'possum of North America. That’s “Virginia” in the broad sense – remember King James’s grant of about 60% of the continent to the Virginia Company? That’s when Linnaeus named it the “Virginia opossum.”
Can’t you just leave it alone with an open door/window? Presumably it doesn’t want to move in with you, and will depart of its own accord if left alone…
Heh. There’s an animal control outfit here whose slogan reads
``AAA Animal control: The animal’s choice’’
Every time I see that, I think `No, the animal’s choice actually seems to involve hanging around in my living room. This is why I need animal control in the first place…’