Almost exactly a year ago I published “Green” Car Wiring Tickles Rodent Tastebuds on this very blog and what should I stumble across today but more news about exactly how tasty car makers have been making their wiring! So tasty that angry customers are actually starting to sue! The below article from nbcnews.com details a class-action lawsuit against carmaker Honda. It seems that in the company’s zeal to pursue eco-friendliness, they have made friends of mice and enemies of some of their customers. The damages caused by the rodents can add up to thousands of dollars very quickly. While Honda deals with angry customers, there is a solution for those of you stuck with yummy soy-based products in your vehicles – predator urine. I am not just saying that – Wiley Faris of Arapahoe Autotek is quoted in the article below – “Predator urine is a good deterrent,” Faris said. “That stuff can take care of the critter damage pretty quick.”
Where do you get predator urine? Predatorpee.com .com of course! Auto mechanics, car dealers, and pest control specialists just like Faris have begun telling their customers about our products, specifically our PredatorPee PeeShots for vehicles and other indoor applications. They are available with WolfPee, FoxPee, BobcatPee, and Mt. LionPee depending on the particular pest you are trying to deter. So, while you are waiting for your class-action money, protect your car from any further damage with predator urine. urine.
Honda’s Soy-Based Wiring Covers Irresistible to Rodents: Lawsuit
byLucy Bayley
Environmentally friendly car wiring with a soy-based coating is too tempting for rodents to resist, according to a federal class-action lawsuit that demands Honda pick up the tab for the damage caused by gnawing mice, rabbits and squirrels.
The breach of warranty lawsuit, filed last week in Los Angeles and first reported by Courthouse News Service, results from the automaker’s quest to “go green” by using soy-based biodegradable wire coating. The coating costs less than plastic but does have a downside, according to lead plaintiff Daniel Dobbs of Wyoming.
In the lawsuit, Dobbs alleged that he had to pay twice to have chewed-up wires in his 2012 Honda Accord replaced at a Honda dealership. The second time, he said, mechanics wrapped the wires in special tape intended to deter rodents, demonstrating that Honda is aware of the issue.
That means car owners should not have to foot the bill for the repairs, argues Dobbs, who was joined by Honda owners in Arizona and Texas in suing Honda.
A deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus), seen in an undated photo provided by the National Park Service. d) John Good / National Park Service via AP
“(The automaker) has turned this defective soy-based insulated wiring into another source of income for Honda and its dealers by charging aggrieved vehicle owners for repairs or parts to deal with the adverse consequences …that Honda should have covered under warranty in the first place,” the lawsuit says.
Other car owners not involved in the lawsuit say they have had similar problems.
“I just picked up my 2013 Honda Accord from the dealer with almost $2,000 worth of work completed due to a wood rat eating a main harness,” one dissatisfied driver said on a forum discussing the issue. “Then I find (that) Honda makes a shrink wrap tape specifically for the problem. Are you kidding me!!! Fix it from the start instead of putting the burden on us consumers.”
This isn’t the first time that the use of soy in vehicles has caused problems. In the mid-1940s, in an attempt to spare metal for the war effort, license plates in some states were made from compressed soy beans and fiberboard. Goats and cows were attracted to the vehicles and regularly chewed off the plates completely.
The soy-based wire coating also has been known to be appetizing. In 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported that rabbits had munched their way through soy-based wiring in cars parked at Denver International Airport.
“They come to the recently driven cars for warmth, and once they’re there, they find that many of the materials used for coating ignition cables are soy-based. And the rabbits find that quite tasty,” Wiley Faris of Arapahoe Autotek repair center told the newspaper.
Faris suggested a solution for anyone seeking to prevent their car from becoming a critter snack shack – coating the wires with fox or coyote urine.
“Predator urine is a good deterrent,” Faris said. “That stuff can take care of the critter damage pretty quick.”
Honda did not immediately respond to a request from NBC News seeking comment on the lawsuit.
I just recently stumbled upon the article below. Finally! A journalist who actually gets me. Honestly, I couldn’t have asked for a better write up about our company, Maine Outdoors Solutions LLC. My wife and daughters especially enjoyed the “juvenile” humor comment, and “exemplifies the essential vigor of capitalism” is just about the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me.
By Jayson Jacoby/The Baker City Herald September 18, 2015 01:58 pm
Should I douse my wife’s garden with the urine of a wolf or a cougar?
As you can imagine, this conundrum is cutting into my sleep.
Nor are my choices, in the realm of liquid produce protection, limited to apex carnivores.
Maybe I can confuse as well as frighten the tomato-gobbling deer and the blackberry-pecking robins by sowing the place with the excretory scent of the fisher, a diminutive but apparently quite vicious type of weasel.
The online market for the liquid byproducts of wildlife micturition — animal pee, if you’d rather dispense with euphemism-by-obscure-vocabulary — is considerably more, well, voluminous than I expected.
Indeed, more than I could have imagined.
Turns out you don’t need to actually own a wolf — and possess a certain deftness with a catheter — to procure the protective powers of a predator’s urine.
An Internet connection and a credit card will bring the stuff — packed in a well-padded and leak-proof box, one would hope — to your front door.
Which saves time and, probably, a finger or two.
It was pure coincidence that introduced me to the brisk commerce in what’s generally considered a waste product.
Not long after my wife lamented the loss of her tomatoes to the neighborhood mule deer, I happened to hear, on a morning radio comedy program, a reference to “predator pee.”
I sensed a potential solution which would be simpler, albeit more aromatic, than erecting 10-foot fences.
Whether Predator Pee ranks as the most prolific purveyor of this substance I can’t say.
But its competitors would have to go a fair piece to match the Predator Pee website — http://www.predatorpee.com, of course — for sheer entertainment.
When I scroll through the site and try to imagine how it came to be, I envision a group of people sitting around a seedy apartment, tossing around ideas rather like the joke writers for Conan O’Brien or Jimmy Fallon. There’s a laptop on the kitchen table, surrounded by empty beer bottles
and grease-stained pizza boxes, and occasionally somebody types in an especially comical line.
The humor on predatorpee.com, as you probably have guessed, lands solidly on the juvenile end of the spectrum.
Puns abound.
The best of these is “pee-rimeter” — the pest-free zone you can create by sprinkling the urine of your choice around whatever it is you want to protect.
The company’s motto, as it were, is “Bringing pee to the people since 1986.”
Remember that year the next time someone contends the Reagan era was a repressive time.
The company’s line is not limited to urine. This is something of a relief.
But even the non-pee parts of the catalog involve other animal byproducts.
The company — its official name is Maine Outdoor Solutions — also sells authentic wool crusher hats. So far as I can tell this is the outfit’s only item that involves, or requires, sheep.
Also available is BearGuard, which isn’t what you probably think it is, what with all the previous urine references.
In fact BearGuard is a water-repellent for boots. It is, however, made from “real bear fat.” I don’t doubt this keeps the rain from soaking your socks. But extracting it from the bear must be a more, well, irreversible process than collecting ursine urine. Which, rest assured, is also available if your garden marauders are particularly fearful of bears.
Jokes aside, Predator Pee exemplifies the essential vigor of capitalism, and its existence proves that in a free market pretty much anything can be turned into a profit.
Indeed, these clever iconoclasts from Maine peddle urine as a way to attract as well as repel wildlife.
Pee, the company claims, will lure butterflies, because it’s an essential source of sodium and other vital elements for these graceful flyers.
The website boasts about this with the sort of breathless enthusiasm typical of online marketing, although the insertion of a single word (the one just before “business”) transforms an otherwise predictable sentence:
“We have been in the urine business a long time, but we always get excited when we discover a new use for this incredibly renewable resource!”
You won’t read that at the Harvard Business School.
The ultimate question, of course, is how Predator Pee obtains its raw materials. I’ll leave the details to the website, but suffice it to say the explanation is mundane.
The company does not, as I had hoped, employ a battalion of short people with quick hands who can move fast even while wearing galoshes.
Greetings! About 10 inches of snow on the ground and more predicted for tomorrow – winter wonderland at Winterberry Farm! But, today’s blog post takes us to a place where Christmas is green and palm trees fill the landscape – beautiful Hawaii. It seems that the author of the following blog had been struggling with the destruction caused by the feral hog population on her island home UNTIL she found PredatorPee! But, you don’t have to take my word for it – read below . . .
Life on Kaua’i: Wild Pigs in Paradise By Gabriela Taylor
author of “Geckos & Other Guests: Tales of a Kaua‘i Bed & Breakfast”
Snorting grunt sounds wake me up in the middle of the night. Baffled at first, I finally emerge from a fog and think that pigs must be poking around somewhere on my property. When the grunts intensify, however, I become alarmed and realize that hogs are climbing the hill to my house. My large furnished lanai is open on one side and its centerpiece, a lush indoor garden, would serve as a delectable gourmet grazing ground for the hungry beasts. Scary thoughts of wild, long tusked, razor-backed, boars pillaging the lanai race through my mind— like a train to hell.
Over the years, country living has allowed a menagerie of unwanted animals to parade through my yard. Among them are: a gaggle of snapping geese, ti leaf chopping cows, a screeching peahen that settled in for 3 months, a herd of goats and now wild boar. In fact, voracious wild pigs are creating havoc all over the island of Kaua’i. Pigs prance down from the mountains in search of food and ruthlessly tear up vegetable gardens, ornamental plants and can even be found rooting around beach resorts. Soil erosion and loss of native plants are serious problems, but what about the tourist industry? Somehow, a “wild pigs in paradise” picture does not fit the happy Hawaiian holiday cliché that lures tourists. Reflecting on the saying,“ if you get a lemon, make lemonade”, I ponder; how can this potential problem become an asset? One idea: clever advertising would feature wild boar BarBQ as sustainable organic fare in our island gourmet restaurants. Although, I have never eaten wild boar, it only seems responsible to consume game that has been killed— and to give thanks.
2 AM
The clock says 2 AM when I jump out of bed, run out on the second story lanai and begin yelling relentlessly, ”Get out of here!” Understandably alarmed, my neighbor comes crashing through the dense foliage ready to scare off a human intruder. ‘It’s the pigs’ I say, “They’re on a rampage.” I am aware that my explanation seems bizarre since, by this time, the pigs have become as silent as deer and no predator, man or beast, is visible in the inky night. My neighbor looks up at me standing on the lanai like an apparition in my white nightgown, shakes his head, says, “good luck”, and disappears. It is apparent that my sanity is in question if not completely negated. By now, the mute pigs don’t seem threatening, even to me, so I fall back into bed, and repress the drama like a bad dream. I remember nothing about it when I wake up.
It is deja vu a few days later when I spot three little, red-brown pigs, perhaps teenagers, nosing around my yard in broad daylight. It jolts my memory to recall the night-marauding pigs. Now, these scoundrels are rooting up some of my favorite ornamental plants, an extensive bank of bromeliads. Would my orchids be next? The next day six spotted swine appear (they seem to group in triplicate just like the nursery rhyme) to scope out the territory. Alas, the following morning broken bromeliads lie scattered on the ground like sacrificial offerings to a hog god. This is serious; I call for help.
My neighbor, I’ll call him Robin Hood, comes by with bow and arrow, (thankfully, when I am away), kills, then later smokes and eats the pork. The following day, Robin Hood’s son, a young tattooed man with bulging muscles, brings over traps. After he scopes out the property and finds likely sites to set them, I ask him, ”what about my cat?” This plan seems sketchy, slow and somewhat dangerous to my pet. And I’m not betting on traps eliminating all 5 remaining pigs in a timely fashion. Maybe there are more, perhaps 9,12 or even 15 pigs waiting to pillage! My bromeliads have suffered severe damage and will be completely decimated if the pigs persist much longer. Still looking for a quick fix, I call the Ag extension man. But he has no other ideas than those that the men are already trying.
A friend of mine has dealt with a wild pig problem successfully in a non-violent way. The once wild pig, named Petunia Hawg, wanders around or sleeps somewhere in his neighborhood until it’s time to eat. Both early morning and late afternoon, Petunia appears punctually at the back door and rubs up against the deck until food is placed in her pot. She no longer destroys gardens and everyone is happy. OK, that is a peaceful solution for one animal, but feeding 6 grunting pigs twice a day is not my calling.
Breakthrough
A big break through occurs at my place. My housemate goes online and discovers the PredatorPee,com website. The principle of this strange strategy is that specific animal urine scents, such as wolf, bobcat, coyote and fox will deter specific predators. I briefly reflect upon how on earth anyone would collect pee from those animals and decide that I don’t want to know, although I am excited about the promise of purging pigs in such a peaceful way. The website says that mountain lion pee is guaranteed to drive off desert animals such as armadillos and javalinas, as well as wild boar. I immediately place an order online.
I can’t bear the thought of dispensing liquid pee, but thankfully they offer an alternative form: crystalline mountain lion pee. Since it has to be shipped from the mainland to Hawaii, I have time to anguish over my diminishing bromeliad bed and talk to people about the problem. Robin Hood’s son comes by to check the traps and reports that they have captured 2 pigs. He is skeptical when I tell him about the mountain lion pee, saying that Hawaiian pigs have never been exposed to lions, so where would the fear come from? That makes sense, but I hope he is wrong.
Finally, one afternoon, I see the brown UPS truck climbing my driveway and get excited. When I tell the deliveryman what’s in the box, he boosts my confidence for its potential by saying that it must work by genetic memory rather than by a learned response. Immediately, I rip open the box and find 2 cylindrical containers, like oversized saltshakers. Indiscreetly, I hold one up to my nose and take a whiff, which almost knocks me off my feet. Feeling like a sorceress who should be chanting magic words, I sprinkle pee crystals around the perimeter of the bromeliad bed. Would these strange, strong and smelly crystals make pigs flee on their tiny hoofs with disgust or fear— or both? Will it work?
Epilogue
Several months later, I can report that no plant-plundering pigs have returned to my property. Elated with success, I email the pee man at to see if they have pee to ward off pesky wild chickens. The reply is informative, but disappointing. They say that chickens do not have a highly developed sense of smell, therefore making it impossible to provide a scent that would scare them away from my vegetable garden. I have a theory. Way back at the beginning, the rooster smell gene became weak when it was intimidated by the sound gene.
I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! We sure did – as always lots to be thankful for!
Without further ado, as promised – the second episode of PredatorPee Unleashed. The following is a video of a boar reacting to our 100% Mt. LionPee and 100% WolfPee. These critters are scared senseless and want nothing to do with the scent of their feared predators. NOTE: This video was provided to us, the PeeMan does not have any boars in pens on the farm(only Stanley the pig) – and no animals were harmed in the production of this clip. Take a look . . .
At http://www.predatorpee.com, we sell Mt. LionPee to protect against wild boar, javelina, and feral hogs BUT our customers in Japan have successfully used both Mt. LionPee and WolfPee to keep these animals out of the rice paddies.
Ok, we have had some serious chill this week up here! A couple of days it only made it into the low 30’s! Well, I shouldn’t complain since I choose to live here.
Anyway, moving on – would you believe that I received another email from a different production company based in New York about a PeeMan reality show?!! I just don’t understand why people would want to sit around and watch me and my family sell, package and ship animal urine. I mean – I think my job is great and definitely fodder for interesting conversation, but I wouldn’t want to sit in front of a screen watching me or anyone else do it.
I do actually have a worthwhile contribution to the “reality tv” craze. The following is a video of “real” live deer reacting to our 100% CoyotePee. Talk about drama! These deer want nothing to do with the scent of one of their feared predators. But, the whole point of reality tv is to see it, not read about it – without further ado – PredatorPee Unleashed – Episode 1
Well, PredatorPee has popped up in the blogosphere, and I didn’t have anything to do with it. I would however like to thank Mike for his kind words and well-written blog. Like I always say, you don’t have to take my word for it. MIKE’S BACKYARD NURSERY.
On the homefront -the snow is melting. . .slowly. I have tapped some of the trees, and the sap is running. Soon I will be boiling it down until it turns into syrup for the grandkids’ pancakes. Looking for highs close to 50 on Friday. Might have to break out the shorts and t-shirt.
Well, I have been telling you that wolf urine is the answer for keeping those crazy coyotes away, but now the wolf pee solution has made it big time. Check out this excerpt of Krysten Ritter on Conan –
Well, up here in Maine, the snow is still on the ground and more supposedly coming this weekend. But, one thing I know is true – spring will come! It will come sooner for many of you – lucky dogs. The deer will be ready to make up for lost time and looking for unprotected gardens and flower beds. Well, the PeeMan doesn’t want the fruit of your hard labor nibbled up by pesky deer again this year. Our 100% original, undiluted, quality CoyotePee is the solution. Just set up a Peerimeter around your garden using our handy 33 Day Dispensers or Scenttags and coyote urine, and beat those deer to the punch this year. But, as I frequently say, you don’t have to take my word for it . . .
If you want another testimonial, count me in. I was honestly skeptical of your claims, especially after reading over and over that NOTHING keeps deer away. I took a chance 2 years ago (going into my 3rd growing season with it), and I haven’t had one deer in my gardens since. They decimate my neighbors’ flower beds, and during the winter went after their evergreens. I’ve watched them wander towards my raised beds and stop dead in their tracks for a minute, then back off and go the other way. It’s fantastic. One of my avid gardener friends thought it was gross to hang bottles of pee in the yard (I think it’s gross to plant 400 tulips and never see even one bloom because the deer ate them). After losing almost everything she planted last year, she came over asking to buy a bottle from me. That’s why I need more!
Thanks,
Joy Breese
Just another satisfied customer and protected garden. Well, I will go back and stoke the fire and begin the long wait for spring in Maine. The PeeMan
The PeeMan here. On another journey into the world of cyberspace I came across the following discussion on VegetableGardener.com
Q. “My gardens are ruined every summer by tunnelling ground squirrels. I am looking for an answer to getting rid of them permanently. Any ideas?”
One of the answers:
“I have had outstanding success with “predator urine.” I find that coyote urine (there are fox, wolf, bobcat and mountain lion available on line). After having terrorist squirrels ravage my garden one year, I tried it. Very small plastic bottles (like motel shampoo ones) with some fiber and holes in them, strunbg every 10-15 feet (and you cannot smell it but skunks, squirrels, deer, woodchucks and rabbits, etc can)…my garden has been completely unmolested for three years! Google “predator urine” and you will get the firms; I use one in Maine. Best, chaepest, environmentally friendly and a fabulous conversation item!”
I couldn’t have said it better myself, and it sounds like they used our 100% PredatorPee.
Hi, this is the PeeMan. I was just browsing the web from the comfort of my PeePalace, and I came across this post in a chat on The Straight Dope in a discussion of predator urine as a deterrent. Sounds a lot like our 100% WolfPee placed in our 33 Day Dispensers. No way to know for sure, but the best part is that the urine of the Canis Lupus cut the coyote invasion short!
Wolf urine
“Hi Sorry about you pets. We were losing ducks to coyotes recently. They finally had started to dig under our chain link fence so I started putting out wolf urine in small containers you can hang on the fence. If you just sprinkle it the rain dilutes it too quickly – I’m in WA. Anyway, it has worked for us. I have heard male human urine works also.”
Adelaide Plains Pest Services in a famous name in the pest treatment industry as they are highly appreciated for the task they perform and the outcomes presented to an individual.
Words from The Peeman 