Animals That Can Help Keep Your Home Pest Free

Birds

While a few birds can be a real headache, others like wild and songbirds can provide a great service by feed on a variety of insects. If you make your backyard a place that attracts birds, they can help control pests that attack your plants and try and enter your home. Adding elements like birdbaths, hedges, berry bushes, and birdhouses can attract these birds. Some of the pests that birds commonly feed on include grasshoppers, slugs, snails, and moths.

 

Cats

Cats prey on all types of rodents, gophers, mice, rats, etc., and can help you keep them out of your home. There are even programs all over the country that incentivize people to adopt feral or barn cats to help with pest control. Utilizing these animals’ instincts and keeping them from being put down.  Shelters encourage people to adopt feral cats for homes or businesses that need assistance with rodent control. These organizations have placed cats at stores, campuses, and police divisions, and they’ve had great success in part because rodents are repelled by the mere smell of cats.

 

Frogs

If you have the space building a small pond can be a great feature for your yard. Plus you can make it a perfect environment for frogs and toads, whose diet primarily consists of insects. This means they aren’t interested in eating your garden but in protecting it instead. A few healthy frogs or toads can be an excellent pest control system.

 

Dogs

Bed bugs have become a serious issue in the US recently, and bug-sniffing dogs have become an essential asset to have. These dogs participate in an intensive training program, similar to bomb or drug dogs except they learn to sniff out bed bugs. Other programs have also been developed for sniffing out termites.

These types of dogs are now used by many pest control companies for their inspections. They are quicker and more accurate than even seasoned professionals at finding bed bugs. This can save you lots of money because if even a single cluster is missed the population will bounce back easily.

 

Bats

Surprisingly, bats can be a perfect addition to your garden for pest control. They will only come out at night when they easily catch garden pests and mosquitoes as they fly by. They can also be used to make great fertilizer. You can easily attract them by building a simple bat house from plans online.