A CRAWLSPACE CASE STUDY, JANUARY 2026
The Rat Job That Turned Out to Be a Squirrel
Everything about this crawlspace said rats: rat and mouse droppings, broken vents and old carcasses. The last company had already used sticky traps, snap traps and poison.
We did the exclusion work, which trapped the animal inside. The customer kept hearing noises and every trap came up empty, until a game camera showed a squirrel. We got this one wrong at first, and our tech says so.
What Our Tech Says in the Video
Don’t worry, I’ll show you what was in this crawl space. Our previous anchoring caused us to continue ineffective treatments for way longer than should have happened. In hindsight, we should have put out the game camera sooner, after the initial number of traps were tripped without effectively catching anything.
It’s a squirrel. That explains why all of our traps are being tripped. Wait for the bushy tail. There it is.
We were absolutely positive it was rats. We had rat droppings. We had mouse droppings. Broken vents. Previous carcasses, mice and rats. The last company had sticky traps out, snap traps, poison in the crawl space, poison on the outside of the house.
We did the exclusion work. The animal was trapped inside, and the customer was still having noises. All of our traps were ineffective. We had a number of types of traps for rats and mice, so sure that it was one of these animals.
I had to go back out and do the crawl of shame. I removed all of our traps and our bait boxes, and I ended up referring the customer to a wildlife pest control company.
Transcript from the video’s captions, lightly edited.
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