NEED LOCAL HELP? We have wildlife removal professionals servicing 95% of the USA. Click here to hire a local raccoon removal expert in your home town. Updated 2018. But read the below advice first!
You should definitely hire a wildlife control professional when you need to remove raccoons from your property. And there are a whole bunch of reasons why you shouldn’t remove them yourself.
Contracting diseases. Humans can easily contract diseases and viruses from raccoons either by being scratched or bit by the animal, as well as by direct tactical contact with their excrements, or by breathing in air particles that have been contaminated by bacteria and parasite eggs in their feces. Even cleaning up after raccoons poses a high risk of contracting raccoon roundworm.
Engaging in unlawful activities. Raccoon trapping without a license or permit is illegal. State and local rules and regulations around raccoon trapping and raccoon hunting vary depending on which jurisdiction you find yourself in, but most US states don’t allow homeowner raccoon removal, nor do they allow homeowners without hunting permits to kill raccoons. Relocating raccoons is also illegal, unless you’re a licensed wildlife removal professional or wildlife rehabilitator. See where you stand on raccoon removal regulations by checking your state law.
Lack of disposal alternatives. If you managed to trap a raccoon, what are you going to do with it now? Relocating it away from residential areas is not a noble thing to do. Secure wild places in the US that can support additions to the already existing raccoon population are not very common. You will probably end up just sending the raccoon to its death, as well as possibly harming other animals that already live there. Keeping the raccoon as a pet is a horrible idea, and won’t work – raccoons are not feral animals, they are completely undomesticated. Keeping the raccoon in a cage is cruel and horrible.
Orphaning raccoon cubs. If you succeed in trapping and removing a female raccoon from your property, there’s a high probability that that raccoon has a litter somewhere in an attic or a chimney. So, you’re leaving some defenseless raccoon babies to starve to death and rot on the property of an unsuspecting neighbor. If you captured the raccoon because you heard and saw it going in and out of your attic or chimney, the litter is most definitely in there. And you’ll probably end up calling pest control anyway, because most of the time it’s hard to find raccoon cubs. And even if you do find them, you shouldn’t start feeding them and raising them yourself – reasons explained above.
I could go on and on, really. I get tons of calls for people that tried removing raccoons by themselves and failed horribly to do so, only adding more to the problem. They only call because the situation becomes too dire for them to handle. So why go through all that unnecessary stress when you can avoid it all by simply placing a call? I’m not absurd, I’m sure that there have been homeowners who have successfully removed raccoons from their properties without any consequences, but I’m never called in those instances, so I can’t talk about what I haven’t seen.
Bottom line: A pro will know how to handle the removal in a safe manner so that neither the animal nor the human suffers by doing a quick and effective job, all in accordance with state regulations.
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