My name is Mark Delgado. I've spent 14 years consulting on residential wildlife exclusion, mostly for families with young kids and pets.
(Note to PestLab team: composite, illustrative professional voice same disclosure convention as the reference advertorials. Swap in a real named, credentialed professional if one is willing to be quoted; that will always outperform and out-defend a composite.)
Early on, my advice to parents was the standard checklist: fence the yard, supervise outside time, keep grass short, remove brush piles.
One family made me question whether that checklist was actually solving anything.
They'd done all of it. Full perimeter fencing. Mowed weekly. No woodpiles, no clutter.
Then one evening, their dog froze mid-yard and stared into the grass before anyone saw why.
Nothing happened. No bite, no injury. But the mother told me afterward that the thought she couldn't shake was simple: "What if he'd seen it before the dog did?"
That family had done everything right, and they still spent the next several months walking every square foot of their own yard before letting their kids out.