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Wild Animal Safety
Wild Animal Home Safety Tips
As the owner of a home, you take pride in your property’s appearance, as well as its ability to keep you and your family safe. When you think about your home’s safety, you probably feel like you have a comprehensive handle on all of the potential dangers that could affect your family. You have equipped your home with the proper fire safety equipment, and you have probably trained your family so that everyone is aware of the appropriate procedures in the event of a fire or other catastrophe. Like many homeowners, you have probably installed a home security system (like LifeShield or something else), as well, in order to prevent the possibility of a burglary or break-in. While human intruders are usually intimidated by such a system before they even consider entering your home, those that proceed are eventually caught and put into jail where they belong. Unfortunately, there are some other types of intruders that are much more difficult to stop.
Urbanization Brings Curious Visitors
Wild animals can be attracted to your home, especially if you have built your house recently in an area that once belonged to nature. Animals need time to develop their migration patterns, and when a house springs up where they once were able to roam freely, they can become confused and try to enter the home. Other wild animals see the homes in your neighborhood as symbols of opportunity. Your home offers shelter, warmth and food, and these things are extremely attractive to animals. As a result, your home can become a cozy living space for a number of uninvited guests. Since most security systems are unable to prevent the intrusion of animals into your house, it is important to know the steps you can take to ensure that your house shelters only you, your family and your invited guests.
Prevention Is Key To Keeping Wild Animals Out
The best way to keep your home safe from animals is to prevent them from entering. This may sound simple, but it requires some effort. First, you should make sure that doors and windows are not being left open unnecessarily. This is one of the most common ways for animals to gain access. Secondly, you should seal any cracks or holes that may be inviting to creatures from nature. Some of these openings may seem far too small for animals to use, but you may be surprised at how easily some creatures can squeeze into cracks if they are motivated to enter your house. Thirdly, you need to make sure that your house and property is kept clean and sanitary. Animals and other pests are attracted to rubbish and dirty conditions because they know that food is available. By denying them the type of environment they prefer, you can keep pests away effectively.
If You Need Help Call A Professional
If you have done all you can to prevent animals from entering your home, but you still have had problems, you will need to remove the creatures as soon as possible. You can certainly use poisons and commercially-available traps, but these methods can lead to problems. It is better to call on the services of a professional trapper or exterminator instead. By hiring a professional, you can ensure that your home is free from the dangers of wild animals and other pests. It may take time and money to make your home safe again, but the associated costs are worth the safety and well-being of your family.
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Finely Tuned Auditory Systems
The Creation Abounds With The Wonder Of Hearing
The sense of hearing, otherwise known as the auditory sense, is something shared between humans and most other animals. The questions that most often arise on this topic are: which animal has the best hearing, and for what purpose do most animals use their auditory senses? Understanding how and why animals use their ears in their natural environment can help create a deeper understanding of the natural world, as well as of each creature’s place in it.
Owls
The eardrum of an owl allows them to find small animals – like mice – in the darkest nighttime conditions. The owl will rarely have to worry about suffering from hearing loss thanks to its large ear holes, which are slightly staggered for optimal auditory understanding and maximum protection.
An owl can hear the smallest sounds in the dark and uses the minor difference in the ears to translate the sound and find its location. It takes an owl less than one second to hear a sound, determine the location of the sound, and determine if the sound is from prey. After that slight period of time, the owl can attack the sound of a mouse or other small animal. Due to this sharp sense of sound, owls are exceptionally effective nighttime predators.
Dolphins
Another animal that will never need to worry about hearing aid prices is the dolphin. Dolphins are like submarines (or perhaps, submarines are like dolphins) in that they use echolocation (also called sonar) to map the area around them and navigate through murky water that is difficult to see through.
The dolphins will make a chirping or clicking sound in the water. When the sound is reflected back at them, they are able to determine the size, location and nature of an object around them. The dolphin can even identify other animals through echolocation and determine if the creature is a threat, a food source, a potential mate, or some other animal they are indifferent towards. A dolphin’s hearing is so sharp that even an object as small as a coin is identifiable from up to 70 meters away.
Bats
Like dolphins, bats are known to use echolocation to find the insects and fruits that they like to eat. However, unlike dolphins – which use echolocation in murky waters – bats use echolocation in the air as their primary way of seeing. Bats are nocturnal, and the sound of their chirps bouncing off plants, other animals, and insects allows a bat to find and locate insects from up to 20 feet away in complete darkness. Since bats are constantly using sound to find their way around, they naturally require strong auditory senses. This helps them locate and determine the distance to their prey all through the night.
Cats
Cats of all sizes, from the small house cat to the largest tigers and lions, are among the animals with the best hearing. Not only are cats able to pick up on much higher frequencies than most other animals, they even are able to move their ears to catch the sound better! Cats can rotate their ears 180 degrees, making it possible to locate and distinguish different sounds with the utmost precision. By rotating their ears, cats pick up the sound much better than most other animals. It provides them with the ability to locate prey and determine whether to attack or whether the animal may be too large.
Elephants
Many might expect elephants to have excellent hearing due to the notoriously large size of their ears. The fact is, elephants do have excellent senses, including their auditory sense. Elephants not only hear sounds at very low frequencies, they are also able to hear through their whole body! The elephant’s trunk, ears and feet are all part of the system that makes up an elephant’s auditory senses. The receptors in the trunk and feet allow elephants to sense vibrations that are so low that the sound is almost impossible to distinguish for most observers, like humans. By having these low receptors, elephants are able to pick up the sound of thunder storms and rain from miles away. This allows the elephants to find and move towards water, an essential trait for survival in hot climates.
Tiger Moths
Many species of moth have developed an acute sense of hearing which allows them to determine when a bat is locating them. The sound of a bat’s chirping for echolocation alerts most moths and allows them a chance to try and escape before being eaten. Unlike most other moths, however, the tiger moth in particular has taken this defense a step further. Upon hearing a bat’s echolocation chirps, the tiger moth will make clicking sounds to break up the echolocation and make it difficult for bats to locate them. The clicking noises disrupt the initial sound so that bats become confused with the sound and miss the moth. In modern parlance, you could say that the tiger moth “jams” the echolocation signal of the bat.
The animals with the best hearing in the world have a truly amazing auditory sense. Despite the fact that animals around the world have better hearing that most humans, the animal who has the best hearing of all is generally considered to be the owl, with dolphins placed second.
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