Neighborhood bullies come in all shapes and sizes. In one California town, it comes with fur.
In one Bay Area town, an aggressive neighborhood squirrel has locals nervous after it attacked several residents, prompting visits to the emergency room for bites and scratches to their arms and legs, according to a local humane society and a resident.
The attacks in the Lucas Valley neighborhood of San Rafael were confirmed by Lisa Bloch, the director of marketing and communications at Marin Humane. She said she knows of at least two people who went to the ER to be treated for squirrel-inflicted lacerations, out of an abundance of caution.
One of those squirrel victims was Joan Heblack, 80, who has lived in her Lucas Valley home for about 11 years and has never had problems with squirrels until she recently took a morning walk. In a phone interview, she said she was on Mt. Diablo Circle when she suddenly felt something heavy on her leg, when she looked down she saw it — a squirrel.
Startled, she began screaming, “Get off, get off,” and tried shaking her legs, eventually batting the squirrel off, she said.
“He kind of turn his head to look at me and I thought: ‘Oh no, he’s going to run up to my face,'” she said.
She said the squirrel eventually jumped off her leg and ran into the backyard of a nearby home.
Heblack said she would later learn she was not the only one to have been attacked by the squirrel. She said at least two neighbors had been squirrel attack victims. She also learned that the squirrel had also attacked a young girl and her aunt while they toured an open house on the same street. She said the woman needed stitches.
The realtor who witnessed the attack placed a flier warning residents in the area about the squirrel, Heblack said. The flier posted in the neighborhood includes a photo of a squirrel leaping in midair and the words “attack squirrel beware.”
“This is not a joke, more than five people have been attacked by a very mean squirrel over past several days on Diablo Circle and Mount Lassen,” the flier read. “This squirrel comes out of nowhere and will attack legs, arms, and faces an leave bite marks and scratches.”
Despite the attack, Heblack pressed on with her walk. For now, she said, she’s staying away from squirrels, and Mt. Diablo Court.
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Squirrels carry some diseases that can be transmitted to humans, including Lyme disease and tularemia, which causes flu-like symptoms and skin ulcers. Bloch said squirrels are not known to carry rabies. In California, skunks, raccoon and bats are more likely to carry the disease, which attacks the brain and spinal cord.
Bloch said it’s rare for squirrels to attack people and the most likely reason has to do with humans hand feeding or hand raising squirrels.
“People who love wildlife will have this notion that they can raise wildlife themselves or hand feed them, and of course that’s really inadvisable because it puts the animal at risk and it puts people at risk,” she said. “This is probably what happened in this case, so it’s a really good reminder why you should never feed wildlife.”
When animals are hand fed, they lose their natural instinct to stay clear of humans, Bloch said. They might approach people expecting to be fed, and when there’s no food they can become aggressive.
She said there was an incident in Stinson Beach where someone hand fed a coyote from a car, soon after, that same coyote was going up to people in cars expecting to be fed.
“I certainly recognize people have good intentions and they might think they’re helping, but they’re not and in fact, they could be hurting certain animals.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
