LESLIE: Mary in North Carolina is on the line with a squirrel situation. Tell us what’s going on.
MARY: Well, I have three porches in my house and my husband found that the squirrels were eating all the porch columns. Well, he went – he replaced them all and lo and behold, they came back and they started chewing again. So, I don’t know what to do. He’s painted them and I’m thinking is there something he could put in the paint or some other product we could use to put – to fix these columns with?
LESLIE: Stop using lamb legs to hold up your porch, geez. Oh, my goodness. I don’t know why they seem to really like your porch posts but they do. And you want to kind of get rid of them in a humane way that’s just going to deter them from chewing on your porch and maybe send them to somebody else’s or just send them back into the wild to eat a tree.
But are you familiar with the company, Havahart?
MARY: Havahart. No, I’ve not heard that.
LESLIE: They have all sorts of humane animal traps and animal repellants and wireless dog fences. And it’s actually H-a-v-a-h-a-r-t.com.
MARY: Oh, OK.
LESLIE: And they’ve got a product that should work for you. It’s called the Critter Ridder Animal Repellant? And it’s a spray and it’s all-natural, so you don’t have to worry about – around kinds or pets. But it will repel nuisance animals: squirrels, raccoons, dogs, cats, groundhogs, really pretty much anything.
MARY: Oh, great.
LESLIE: But it only lasts for about 30 days, so you will have to reapply it. But it has things like black-pepper oil, things that they’re not going to like. And it’s not something that you’re going to be bothered by. So if you’ve got even like a birdfeeder that the squirrels are getting at, you can try this on that.
But give it a whirl. You can find it online. I think it’s about 12 bucks a bottle; it’s not too expensive.
MARY: OK.
TOM: Mary, thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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