Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Squirrels

A happier ending than I was expecting on this.

A few days ago I took a call from a friend who'd been contacted by another of her friends who was in great distress because the complex where she worked had problems with squirrel damage in their roof area and pest control operatives had been called in. 

Both of them were so upset about it that it was difficult to be clear what exactly was happening, but eventually they explained that that the squirrels had been trapped and were simply being left to die. 

This is clearly not legal under UK law, which insists that bird or mammal traps must be checked at least once a day and I suggested that they should call the RSPCA NCC, making it clear that it was a complaint about the squirrels being caused to suffer, not about them being killed (which is not in itself illegal).

I'm still not absolutely clear whether the squirrels were actually inside live traps in the roof space, or trapped in the space itself after the holes through which they were entering had been blocked up, but my friend called this evening to say that one of our inspectors had visited the building and got the squirrels released (blocking the entrance holes after them so that they couldn't return).

I must say that I had been expecting that the result would be to ensure that the squirrels were killed humanely instead of suffering a lingering death—and a pretty pointless one as a couple of them are not going to make much difference to the total squirrel population of Cambridge.

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