Governments train dolphins to find mines who says they can’t train squirrels to take out infrastructure 
This is my new favorite conspiracy theory.
There is a legend that every time the power blinks, a squirrel gets its wings.
are the wire sheath made from organic plastic by any chance?
Squires love the taste of that.
Quick! Someone needs to find a video of squirrels running around on monkey bars so we can use that as proof of this!
Dogs have been warning us about this for decades, but do we take their advice and burn the suckers out of the trees with flame-throwers or shoot them off of fence posts with shotguns?
Nooooo.
We tell the dogs to be quiet and drag them away, leaving the commie punk saboteur squirrels to gnaw away at our precious infrastructure.
As a member of the solar industry, I can confirm that squirrels love to destroy everything associated with electrical infrastructure. Special compounds are added to wire insulation to make it unpalatable - they eat it anyway. Steel cloth is wrapped around PV arrays to prevent squirrels from getting to the wire - they chew through it (seriously). If they make a home under the array, they dig through the shingles into your attic, pull up romex, and use it to make nests. What is their deal? WHY?
Tell me about it. It isn’t just the infrastructure that squirrels are ruining. I won’t mention how much money I’ve spent this year alone on car repairs because of damage done by squirrels. A few years ago the guy at the auto shop and I were both equally baffled by how and why some wires were cut deep inside my car. A few more incidents later and I realized those wires weren’t cut. They’d been chewed.
For a while an employee kept a squirrel feeder nailed up to a tree outside of her cubicle window. Of course, the place was swarming with squirrels. Four or five cars parked in the vicinity had vital wiring chewed up by the tree rats.
Eventually the squirrel feeder came down.
Impudent little bastards.
They mostly come at night. Mostly.
See my FOIA to DHS on this topic. We need answers from DHS on what they’re doing to address this grave threat to our way of life. https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/dhs-efforts-to-mitigate-squirrel-attacks-on-our-infrastructure-6597/ #SquirrAlQaeda
I still remember taking one of Dr. Burnaby Munson’s hard as heck chemistry exams in 1989 in a University of Delaware building when the power went out due to a suicidal squirrel. Apparently there was a flash of light and the sound of burnt, furry meat hitting the ground.
yup. there have been numerous reports of this happening with new wiring on cars which is organic and thus edible. It’s like beef jerky for squirrels.
Rodent spray seems to keep them out though.
First, they came for the squirrels and I said nothing.
Funny, the Smithsonian Magazine had an article about a similar problem: ground squirrels were burrowing past the fences of a nuclear weapons storage facility and setting off the motion detectors (http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/08/how-one-nuclear-missile-base-is-battling-ground-squirrels/).
I would have thought that, with a squirrel problem on one hand, and a ready supply of nuclear weapons on the other, the obvious solution would present itself.
Nuke 'em all, and let God squeak it out.
I hadn’t heard about car wiring getting chewed up before. In my neighborhood, usually it’s a juvenile crow shorting a pole mounted transformer, but sometimes squirrels do it too. I don’t get why they don’t insulate the mains with a hinged cap on top of the pole. It’s not like a squirrel or crow could work a bolt.
Someone told me that they’ll chew through steel but not copper mesh. Seems worth a shot, anyway.
Copper mesh would be so expensive that it would be impractical - copper prices are extremely high right now, we even avoid copper wiring whenever possible. The solution is usually thicker cloth. The thing that is funny about the squirrels chewing through hardware mesh is that it is very regionally dependent - some areas they will just give up, but in some areas they are so intent to get back to that wiring that they’ll hurt themselves trying to chew through 18 gauge steel hardware mesh. Maybe something to do with the time of year they are barred from entry, or competition for resources among squirrels?
