Penny the WonderDog KNOWS! the Squirrel Mafia is after us. She does her best to purge our neighborhood, yet is oh, so slightly not fast enough…
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I’ll just leave this here.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/96909/Squirrels-go-nuts-on-crack.html
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Not to knock SF, but I suspect that just about all major cities have more wildlife than most of the inhabitants suspect. Apart from anything else, cities tend not to be full of barbed wire fences, drenched in pesticides and infested with hunters. They also provide a lot of sheltered areas, and a lot of human beings who are likely to feed anything that looks remotely cute.
Monoculture farming means that biodiversity is more likely to be found in suburban gardens.
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I thought squirrels were vegetarians?
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I thought so too, but I guess like fellow rodents they’re omnivorous and opportunistic.
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Were being the operative word.
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You bring out the bad in me.
Don’t stop 
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That’s actually rather unpleasant. Squirrels may be annoying, but firing it like that could result in internal injuries that would take a long time to kill it.
This is no effing joke. If you are bit, go to an emergency room immediately. While the cause may be as simple as a parent defending unseen offspring, the squirrels can carry bubonic plague and raccoon may carry rabies. With rabies, the disease itself prompts them to attack like zombies.
Great piece on This American Life: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/319/and-the-call-was-coming-from-the-basement
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When I was just out of high school, I worked in the Sierra Nevada foothills at an outdoor education school. One weekend, I got a ride up to the school from my brother and on this one stretch of road there were multiple squirrel roadkill (I mean hundreds). We also spotted other squirrels that appeared to be helping their fallen comrades, but my biologist brother assured me that they were honoring their deaths by eating them.
I was so sad.
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As well as a whole lot of other nasties.
As for rabies, years ago the Swiss got worried about rabies in foxes. But this is the Swiss, who are sensible people. They didn’t start panicking and shooting everything in sight. They dropped loads of chicken heads loaded with rabies vaccine, by helicopter. The foxes ate the chicken heads and the sharp bones caused enough tiny lesions in their mouths to get the vaccine where it was needed.
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