Britain’s 2.7 million greys are on the rampage, starting fires, flooding homes and destroying ancient trees. But is it really right to kill and eat them?
‘This poor lady didn’t close her loft hatch properly and the squirrel got into the flat,” recalls John Silby, a 58-year-old pest controller. “She thought she’d been burgled. The telly was off the wall, plates were smashed, furniture was ripped. We put traps in. When we went back and opened the door, we could smell dead rodent. But the traps hadn’t gone off.”
Silby’s grey squirrel stories have the urgency, mystery and gore of a Sherlock Holmes tale. Once, one of his colleagues was bitten by a squirrel, whose massive incisors went through his thumbnail and out the other side. Silby couldn’t get the animal off, because it was locked on and wriggling, so he had to decapitate it, then wrap the thumb – and the squirrel’s head – in a bandage to take his colleague to A&E.
