Will animal control come get the animal in my attic?
The short answer
No. Not in Memphis, not in Shelby County, and not through TWRA. There is no public agency that will come and remove a healthy wild animal from your house. Memphis Animal Services refers wildlife concerns to the state or to private companies, and TWRA states that its officers typically do not trap or remove nuisance wildlife.
That leaves three real options: exclude the animal yourself, hire a permitted private operator at your own expense, or wait a few weeks if it is a mother with young.
If you do trap one yourself, Tennessee law is specific about what happens next, and it is not what most people assume. You may not drive it somewhere else and let it go.
Why nobody comes
TWRA's stated reason is volume. There are too many human-animal interactions in Tennessee for the agency to help individual landowners catch things, so wildlife officers provide technical advice instead of a trapping service.
Animal control's remit is domestic animals. Shelby County's Rabies Control programme says outright that it does not service requests involving wildlife, naming snakes, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, rats and birds. Memphis Animal Services says its only legal wildlife function is humane euthanasia of sick or injured animals.
So the honest picture is that a healthy raccoon in your soffit is legally your problem to solve. It is annoying, and it is the actual situation.
What you are allowed to do yourself
More than people think. TWRA's guidance is that a landowner or tenant can legally capture some species of nuisance wildlife without a permit when the animal is causing damage. Some species are protected and some are not, so it is worth a call to the Jackson regional office at 731-423-5725 if you are unsure what you are dealing with.
Big game is the clear exception. Deer, turkey and bear require a permit before anyone destroys them under these provisions.
The part that surprises everyone
Once you have trapped it, TWRA's guidance is that you must release or euthanise the animal on your own property.
Not at the park. Not across the river. Not out past the county line where it will be happier. The reason is disease movement. TWRA's position is that it is illegal to transport live wildlife and release it without a permit — the two acts together. That is about catching an animal and turning it loose somewhere else. It is not the same thing as driving an injured animal to a licensed rehabilitator, which TWRA itself tells the public to do, because rehabilitators cannot come and collect.
We understand this lands badly. Someone with a raccoon in a trap and a forty-minute drive in mind is trying to do the humane thing. But relocation is also not the kindness it appears to be. A dropped-off adult raccoon lands in territory it does not know, held by animals that do, without its cached food or its den, and often with young left behind to starve where you took it from. Survival rates for relocated adults are poor.
Exclusion — making the space impossible to live in and letting the animal leave under its own power — is both legal and, in our experience, the thing that actually works permanently.
How to get them out without creating orphans
This is the part we care about most, because it is where our intake comes from. Every spring and late summer we take in litters that were sealed into a wall or dug out of a soffit by someone who did not know they were there.
TWRA's own guidance says it directly: be careful capturing animals in spring, because young may be involved, and before closing any entry point make sure every animal has already left.
Work out whether it is a mother with young first. Scratching or chirring sounds from the same spot at dawn and dusk, an animal going in and out on a schedule, and the time of year are the clues. Squirrels have two litter waves, roughly February to May and July to October. Raccoons usually have one, breeding in midwinter with kits arriving in March and April.
If there are young, wait if you possibly can. Squirrels move their litters at around ten to twelve weeks; raccoons leave a den site within roughly eight to ten. Waiting a few weeks costs you an inconvenience and saves a litter.
Make the space unattractive rather than trapping. A radio on talk stations, a bright light left on, and daytime activity nearby will often convince a mother to shift her young to one of her other sites on her own. She has other sites.
Use a one-way door on the entry hole once you are confident everyone is mobile. The animal leaves, cannot get back in, and no one is sealed inside.
Then close the hole properly, and find out how it got in. Wildlife does not chew into sound wood for fun. There is usually rot, a lifted shingle, or an open soffit vent behind it.
If you seal a hole and then hear crying from inside a wall, call us before you do anything else. That is a solvable problem for a day or two and then it is not.
Hiring someone
TWRA permits private Animal Damage Control operators who will trap and remove wildlife at the landowner's expense. The agency is unusually candid about the limits of that arrangement: it does not have regulatory authority over these operators and does not guarantee the quality of their work.
So ask questions before you hire. Whether they check for young before excluding. What they do with what they catch, given the release-on-your-own-property rule. Whether they will repair the entry point or only remove the animal, because removal without repair means you will be doing this again next year with a different raccoon.
Traps, and one Memphis ordinance
If you buy a live trap at a hardware store, the rules above apply to what happens next.
Within the City of Memphis, the animal code makes it unlawful to set or bait any steel leg-trap or other contrivance that would maim, mutilate or seriously injure an animal. Cage traps are a different thing and are not covered by that provision. We would add that a cage trap left in the Memphis sun without shade or water is its own kind of cruelty — check it morning and evening, every day, or do not set it.
That is Memphis Code section 8-8-6. The code separately defines a cage trap as one that holds an animal unharmed, which is why the maim-or-injure language does not reach it.
Glue traps and poison
We are asked about both, so we will be direct.
Glue traps do not kill. They immobilise, and the animal dies over hours or days of exhaustion, dehydration and injuries from trying to pull free. We see what comes off them. They also catch whatever walks across them, which in this city regularly means songbirds and juvenile squirrels rather than the intended rodent.
Poison kills slowly and does not stay where you put it. A poisoned rat is a slow, easy meal, so the dose moves into whatever eats it — an owl, a hawk, a neighbourhood cat, a dog. Second-generation anticoagulants are the worst for accumulating, though the older ones poison secondarily too, and so do the non-anticoagulant products. If you are already feeding raptors by having them nest nearby, poisoning their food supply is working against you.
Exclusion and repair are slower and less satisfying and they are what actually ends the problem.
When it is not a nuisance call at all
If the animal is injured, or it is a baby on its own, or it is out at a strange hour behaving oddly, this page is the wrong page. Call us at 901-340-6534.
And if you are simply not sure which situation you have — a lot of people are not — call anyway and describe it. Working out whether something is an emergency is a normal part of what we do.