Okay, let's just dispense with the niceties, okay? I despise squirrels. They're basically just rats with a dose of cute. I have a friend who immigrated here from west Africa and he was amazed that there were so many, just freely running around without a care in the world -- such an untapped food source. I wanted to puke. Vile beasts, squirrels. And they are literally everywhere in my city. They seem to have no real predators except cars.
Two of them decided to take up residence in the stairwell to our basement this fall. I would sit at the computer, on the other side of the wall from them, and hear them scritch-scratching quite often. They were making a mess of the insulation and chewing the two-by-fours. We could never quite catch them at it, however.
When I got home yesterday afternoon after school, my husband proudly said that he had managed to do away with one of them by trapping it in a wire basket, then grabbing it with a gloved hand. He didn't say how he snuffed out the varmint, but I'm sure it was gruesome enough. Hooray, I thought... the other one will have been scared away and we won't have any more trouble.
Wrong.
I sat down at the computer desk to read some snail-mail, and behold... the telltale scritchy-scratch. Squirrels really don't have a lot of brains going for them. I set my jaw and went for my varmint gun, a trusty Daisy BB/pellet shooter (since I was still in the house, y'know, and since I live in the big city where they frown on people blasting real guns inside their houses). I loaded it and pumped it up, and headed around the corner to the basement steps.
When I opened the door, the squirrel (up on a shelf) panicked and leaped out toward me into the kitchen behind me. He bounced off a cabinet and unceremoniously landed on the floor, where, sprawling and scrambling, he began to run back toward the door to the basement. I'm not the kind of person who gets freaked out by this sort of nonsense, however -- I just lifted my foot (clad in a nice heavy shoe) and brought it down on top of him before he could reach the doorway. No way was that thing getting away from me... I took the Daisy off safety and did away with him on the kitchen floor, under my foot.
I had made the children stay in the other room; this was something I didn't want them to have to watch... but they insisted on seeing the carcass, so I hoisted it up and showed them before dropping it into several plastic shopping sacks, tying it up, and disposing of it in the outside garbage.
Hear me roar, squirreldom! Stay out of my house!
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