How to Get Rid of an Armadillo Under Your House

Two things bring an armadillo under a house: a grub-rich lawn to feed on, and a gap under a slab, deck or porch that is easier to enlarge than to dig fresh.

Step one: confirm nobody is home

Sealing an animal under your own slab is the mistake this whole job is arranged around avoiding.

1. Find every entrance. Armadillos dig multiple burrows and often more than one mouth per burrow. Walk the skirting of the house, the deck, the porch, the shed and any slab edge
2. Stuff each entrance loosely with crumpled newspaper, or sprinkle a band of flour or fine sand across it
3. Check at first light. Pushed-out paper or outbound tracks with none returning means it left and has not come back
4. Repeat for two or three nights. Armadillos do not emerge every night, especially in cold weather
5. Only then treat the burrow as empty

Step two: close the burrow properly

• Backfill with gravel in tamped layers. Armadillos re-excavate soil easily and gravel badly
• Pin hardware cloth flat over the area, buried an inch or two down, so a fresh attempt at the same spot meets wire
• Then look along the wall for where they will try next, which is the point of the barrier in the next section

Step three: the barrier that makes it permanent

One sealed burrow moves the animal two feet along the wall. The barrier is what ends it.

1. Dig a trench along the skirting of the deck, porch or slab, twelve to eighteen inches deep
2. Set hardware cloth or welded wire — quarter to half-inch mesh — down the face, fixed to the structure at the top
3. Angle the bottom twelve inches outward into an L, away from the house, and backfill over it. An animal digging at the base hits a horizontal apron rather than finding a gap
4. No gaps at corners or posts. This is where every barrier fails
5. Backfill with gravel at the surface rather than soil

Do the deck and the shed at the same time. An excluded armadillo looks for the next best void within a night or two, and that is the one you did not screen.

Step four: take away the food

A lawn being rolled up every night is a lawn full of soil invertebrates. The digging is the animal eating, not the animal vandalising.

• Check for grubs. Lift a square foot of turf; more than about five or six larvae underneath means a grub problem, and the armadillo is a symptom
• Treat the grubs — beneficial nematodes for a slow biological route, or a registered insecticide if the infestation is heavy
• Water less, and deeper. Soft, constantly damp soil is both easier to dig and better grub habitat
• Clear brush piles, log stacks and dense low cover near the house, which are the daytime shelter that makes the yard worth sleeping in
• Fallen fruit off the ground

Handling, and the one health note

• Do not handle an armadillo, alive or dead, with bare hands
• Nine-banded armadillos can carry Mycobacterium leprae, and a small number of human leprosy cases in the southern United States have been linked to them. The route is handling or eating them, not sharing a yard
• Gloves when working around burrows, and wash afterwards
• They do not bite defensively in any meaningful sense, but they jump straight up when startled, which is how so many are hit by cars

What does not work

• Mothballs. No effect, and illegal used outdoors in most places
• Ammonia, predator urine, castor oil. A few days of mild avoidance at best
• Ultrasonic repellers. No evidence of effect
• Filling the hole with soil. Reopened within the week
• Trapping without a barrier. Another armadillo arrives at an unscreened void, because the void was the attraction
• Relocating one. Prohibited in many states, and usually fatal to the animal