Well, yes.
If you pissed on the squirrel, he would be pissed off, and you would have one of those loopy cause and effect things.
So a couple summers back, around 8:45 PM, our doorbell rings. It is our strapping six-foot neighbor Joe, who wants to borrow a really long pole.
“Why?” we ask.
“Because there’s a squirrel stuck in the new birdfeeder I put up yesterday, and my wife’s pregnant, and she’s afraid that if I handle it, I might catch something that could affect the baby.”
We dig out our pruning hook and lend it to Joe, and he starts squirrel unsticking efforts from our side of the fence. They are fruitless and it’s rapidly getting darker. When I was a kid our family had a tame squirrel for a few summers, so I’m not real afraid of them. I put on my up-to-the-elbow rose-pruning leather gloves and wander over to Joe’s backyard, where I see the problem. This little guy has managed to get his hind foot very badly wedged into a “V” where the bird feeder hanging hook is attached to the pole; and he’s hanging head down. I walk up real slowly and speak soothingly ( yes, animals don’t understand words, but they do hear your tone) and give him my hand to sit on so he can stop hanging downward.
Naturally he’s really stressed and trembling, but he gets calmer now that he’s not upside down.
Meanwhile, Joe and my husband have come over and they are watching from a safe distance. I realize that I can’t just lift him out of the “V” because he has gotten a loop of the bird feeder hanging cord wrapped around his foot, so I get my husband to come over and we carefully lift the whole pole + feeder out of the ground and gently lower it to the ground. Then we take my husband’s Swiss Army knife, cut the cord, loosen the loop around the squirrel’s foot.
He’s clearly thinking “And now, they’re going to KILL me,” when we step back about six feet, and he recovers and makes a dash for the nearest tree.
Problem solved.
Our birdfeeder is one of those brilliant deals where the weight of a squirrel or a really heavy bird causes the feeder door to snap shut. Every spring, we watch a new crop of juvenile squirrels figure out that there is no way to get to ALL the birdseed inside. They’ll just have share in the spillage with the pigeons.
We’ve never had a squirrel in the toilet, but my cats used to occasionally bring in a garter snake. There you are, eating your Rice Krispies, and suddenly you see a snake slithering at top speed for sanctuary under the refrigerator. Makes it hard to concentrate on breakfast.
Pretty sure that happy - shaky trickle down stuff wouldnt have thrilled him either.
Well done, AuntPam!
I’ve shuttled two squirrels, on different occasions, out of a basement laundry room. Used my heavy winter gloves so I wouldn’t get bit. I was renting a room in a duplex at the time; the critters must have entered via the crawlspace and were unable to go out the way they came in.
Switching species…
One of the summers I spent in Vermont, I was walking down a country road that ran around the base of a hill (may have been the same day I almost trod on a field mouse, I don’t remember). There was a house set back from the road, with a garage and parking space adjacent to it; out where a garbage truck could get to it sat an open dumpster. Off to one side, there was a big pile of branches where they had been clearing brush from the hillside.
I heard this godawful noise coming from the direction of the house, like a huge bear or moose rampaging through the brush. I thought an appropriately large animal had lost its footing and was tumbling down the hill; then I realized the noise was coming from the dumpster. Something was inside rummaging through the waste, making a terrible racket with all the plastic bags and such.
I approached the dumpster very cautiously and peeked inside. I was flabbergasted to see a family of raccoons inside, a huge mama coon and four of her babies (and they were already as big as Jack Russell terriers). How they got into the dumpster, I have no idea, but they sure as hell couldn’t get out. The babies were scared when I looked in, but mama made a lunge for me. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to attack me or just trying to grab ahold of my hand so she could climb out.
It took me a minute to figure out what to do. I couldn’t just leave them there (God knows what would have happened to them), but I sure wasn’t about to stick my arm in to try and help them out.
Anyone care to guess what happened next? What would you have done in my place?
I would try to find a branch she could use to climb out.
Yep. Chekhov’s Gun strikes again!
I found one in the pile that was about nine feet long and five inches in diameter at the base. It fit beautifully in the dumpster, and stretched close enough to the side of the hill so they’d only have to jump a foot or so to get back on the ground.
I stuck it in diagonally and backed away to watch the show. About a minute after I sat down on a rock, they started climbing out with mama in the lead, just like a train of circus elephants. When they got close enough to the hill, they jumped off one by one and disappeared into the brush.
My good deed for the summer! 
It would be more fun for the rest of us if you got a (large caliber) shotgun & shoot the next one in the bowl; with the proper detail, we could finally have a contender to rival Scylla’s ‘The Horror of Blimps’.
Kinda rough on the bathroom fixtures.
you’ve never lived until you’ve had a sewer rat doing laps in your bowl.
They can probably swim better than squirrels and fight back more fiercely. No thanks.