Use a Food Dispensing Toy for Fast Eaters. If your dog eats too fast use a food dispensing toy (we love the Kong Wobbler & Bob a Lot), or place a few tennis balls in their bowl to slow their eating. Not only does this keep them from eating too quick, it gives them a nice mental workout.
That recommendation became the first in a series of months-long attempts to get her unwanted lodgers out of her apartment. Animal Control had estimated the animals had climbed behind the wall of their fireplace and into their ceiling.
Irizarry’s roommate at the time, Tamika Alleyne, who also talked to TODAY, says that eventually, they moved into the ceiling above her bedroom.“I heard it in my room trying to scratch through my light,” Alleyne said, noting that at times she could hear the raccoons scratching at the living room and hallway ceilings. “Basically they were living rent-free.”Irizarry described the process of getting the animals to vacate as particularly slow and that her landlord seemed a little too unfazed. “He was just kind of like, ‘Oh, not again,’” she explained of the first time she notified him of the situation, adding that when an Animal Control officer finally appeared at her door it was a week later.Use a Roll of Packing Tape to Pick Up Loose Pet Fur. Do your clothes pick up dog hair like crazy? Don’t have a lint roller on hand? One of my favorite life hacks for dog owners is using packing tape to pick off all that dog hair that gets all over your clothes.
To her dismay, the officer wasn’t surprised at all. “They said that there was history in that building,” Irizarry said. According to her, the pest control officer claimed that the apartment’s past tenants would come home to find raccoons in the house waiting for them in the living room. They would enter through the chimney.
Make Your Dog Their Own Digging Box. If your dog loves to dig keep you can keep your garden safe by teaching them to use their very own digging box.
“Would have been nice to know,” Irizarry shrugged, noting that this tidbit of information served as an answer to her previous confusion about the why apartment’s fireplace had been plastered off. Irizarry says that if she’d put two and two together she wouldn’t have moved into the apartment. She wouldn’t have had to have dealt with months of anxiety, sleep loss, days off work and potentially a stretch of illness, which she suspects could have been from inhaling raccoon feces,
“I did notice that all of us kind of got sick at one point and we thought that we were just sharing a cold around,” Irizarry explained underlining that she and her roommates had not been experiencing COVID. “The energy just wasn’t there but I feel like that was mainly from the lack of sleep.”
INTERESTING FACT ABOUT YOUR PET: Having a pet in the home can actually lower a child’s likelihood of developing related allergies by as much as 33 percent. Children exposed early on to animals tend to develop stronger immune systems overall.
“I can laugh about it now but at the time, it was just super traumatizing.”