Opossum repellent
Although naturally not harmful to people, opossums can cause a large amount of damage to a home they invade. Amongst strategies available to protect your home are prevention (fencing, home repairing), trapping the animal and relocation or putting it down, depending on the current laws of your country/state. By far the best strategy for avoiding having to deal with opossums is prevention and relocating. However, techniques for repelling Kansas City rodents are numerous and popular. Some homeowners swear on their effectiveness and some swear they tried all of them and none has worked. One way or another, opossum repellants deserve a few words, and surely are worth trying (but not counting on them too much).



Store-bought opossum repellents
Chemical repellents. Widely available in all ranges of prices and formulas, these chemical repellents should be sprayed on different surfaces in your home. Their taste and smell should bother opossums from inhabiting your territory. However, most homeowners claim these are highly ineffective. They are easily washed off by rain, and opossums quickly grow accustomed to their smell. Simple, if the smell of food coming from your house or the smell of trash is more appealing to possums than the irritation that repellent causes, this small animal will simply learn to ignore it.

Ultrasonic sound repellents
Emitting disturbing sounds in the area where turned on, ultrasonic sound repellents should be unbearable for rodents. It should be an effective way of driving them away, along with other unwanted critters.

Homemade opossum repellents
If you wish to avoid distributing toxic chemicals on your soil, surfaces and plants, there are few simple recipes that are believed can help with repelling opossums.

Ammonia
The strong scent of ammonia should be unbearable for opossums to handle. However, tackling this toxic chemical on your own can be counter- productive. Ammonia is harmful to all other animals and to people as well. Even though it might repel an opossum, it could cause more damage than good. Mothballs are considered to be effective in repelling many of the animal species, like raccoons, skunks, rats, and also opossums. If you wish to try this strategy out, simply place few balls near your fences, in dark corners of your house, on your attic, basements, underneath your stairs and porch. Their smell and taste should be very unappealing to opossums.

Fox and coyote urine.
It is well known that opossums are afraid of predators. Also, if you have a pet, releasing it in your front yard should scare away the opossum. If the opossums smell the presence of a dog, it should scare away. Chili peppers and dish detergent squirt. This recipe is also used to repel raccoons, and it involves mixing up a spray made of about 1l of water, a tablespoon of hot sauce or chili peppers and a tablespoon of dish detergent. Squirting this mix on to your plants, near your fences and other places an opossum might try to enter your home, should cause a strong an unpleasant smell to spread, repelling the animal.

Cassia
Cassia is a south-American plant, famous for its strong scent. Leaves of Cassia are available to buy at a very affordable cost. It is very popular for those who believe in repelling opossums.

Homemade technical repellents
Some utilities you probably already have in your home are believed to be able to scare the possums away.

Water sprinkles
Quite self-explanatory, sudden spritzes of water should scare off any animal. Turning theses on at night should help to protect your home from a pest invasion.

Radio
The mimicking human voice should scare of and repel opossums or rodents. If you leave a radio on at night, on your front porch or in your yard, it should give the impression of human presence and scare of the animal. Now that we’ve gone through various types of homemade and bought repellents, the fact is that their effectiveness is not highly valued. Natural and chemical repellents are easily washed off by rain and can easily evaporate in the sun. It’s even said that, sometimes, opossums can actually grow accustomed to these smells and completely ignore them.

It is also said that many of the chemical repellents, most of them, actually, don’t work. Water sprinklers didn’t prove to be very effective in scaring opossums, as well as radio. Ultrasonic sounds also have a low effectiveness rate, and can be quite expensive.

Different types of repellents are definitely worthy of trying out. Some people swear by them and some against them. Overall, the best strategy for dealing with Kansas City opossums still remains to be prevention and relocating. But, since repelling methods we were talking about are not harmful to the opossums, there is nothing wrong with testing them.

Go back to the Kansas City wildlife removal home page.