Hi Ecolog, I am soliciting advice for a friend of mine that works for a company which makes braids for industrial purposes. She has a question about how to get mammals (specifically squirrels) to avoid chewing on outdoor braiding, and mammals are not my expertise. Please see below.
"One of the products we've developed is a cord used in an outdoor application (a cord that holds up a billboard). As you can imagine when this fails it gets very expensive because they lose the entire printed advertisement it was holding up. We've recently gotten some calls from our customer who has reported this happening three times lately and they claim that it because squirrels are chewing through the cord. I talked to one contact I have who used to be a chemist for a paint co and had formulated a specialty paint for horse fencing that had suspended cheyenne pepper in it, which was effective at keeping animals from gnawing on the fence. We coat this cord as well so I was thinking that we could add capsaicin or pepper into the formula but I wanted to check with someone who might actually know something about what squirrels would and would not eat first. Let me know if you have any idea of what I might be able to do to ward off hungry rodents or if you happen to know of any squirrel experts I could contact." Do you have any advice or information, or know where / whom I could point her to? Please answer off-list, and I will summarize answers to send to her. Thanks for any help, Chelse PhD candidate University of Notre Dame www.nd.edu/~cprather
