I don't know of any legal form of poison that you can use to rid your yard of the armadillos. Armadillos are there because there's some sort of living critters in the soil that they like to eat. Normally they are after the white grub worms in the soil, so treating the yard at the right time of the year to kill the grubs will reduce the available food supply. I used Milky Spore Powder scattered on the ground and watered in during the month of either July or August in our early years here and it really reduced the grub population which made our yard less attractive to armadillos. However, in the absence of grubs, the armadillos just dig and eat other soil-dwellers, including earthworms, so you'll never be able to completely rid your soil of things the armadillos like to eat. Cayenne pepper works for me if I scatter it right on the soil surface in areas where they are digging, but I generally don't use it because we are on rural acreage and the wild animals have to eat to survive. I try to coexist with them as much as possible because there's no way you'll ever get rid of all of them. Nature abhors a vacuum, so when you eliminate the dillos you have, more of them just move in from elsewhere. That's how nature works. We have fenced the digging dillos out of our veggie gardens, and I grow fruit, flowers and herbs in the veggie gardens along with the veggies since that's the only armadillo-proof area that I have. If I had armadillos under my house, I'd go to Sam's Club, CostCo or to an ethnic, oriental-type grocery store, and buy the huge bulk containers of hot pepper that they sell and I'd sprinkle it on the ground where the armadillos are burrowing under the house, and I'd sprinkle it wherever they were feeding. They don't like getting a snout full of hot, cayenne pepper and usually will move along elsewhere after experiencing that a few times. You will have to sprinkle more cayenne on the ground after each rainfall. The Dirt Doctor always has been a big proponent of repelling them with cayenne, so I'll link a page from his website where he discusses using this method to repel the armadillos. If you kill them and they are under your house, you will have to put up with the smell of their decomposing bodies for however long it takes the soft tissue to fully decompose. It will not be pleasant to smell that. The smell won't ruin the neighborhood forever, but it might make living in your house really unpleasant for several weeks. If you're able to drive them out from under the house by using the cayenne pepper, I'd suggest you lay down chicken wire several feet wide to completely cover the area where they were going under the house, and use boards to hold it down. This will exclude them if they should forget about the misery of the cayenne pepper and try to return in a few weeks or months. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Dirt Doctor: Armadillos and Cayenne Pepper

The reason the skunk formula works is that there is some sort of chemical reaction between the hydrogen peroxide and baking soda that helps neutralize the smell. It sometimes takes several baths with the stuff (and I think mostly the Lemon Joy helps the formula adhere to you, the animals or your clothing long enough to work) to get rid of the lingering smell, but it works much better than anything else we've tried, including tomato juice (which will dye a white dog pink and increase its humiliation by making it both stinky and pink). You don't go into your house until you've done everything in your power to get the smell off of you or your house will smell like skunk for weeks. I found the skunk recipe in a country living type magazine (I think it was in Harrowsmith) in the 1990s, clipped it and held on to it for years before we even moved here. I knew it would come in handy someday, and it did. You keep a skunk kit in an outbuilding like a garage (hopefully one that is detached from the house so the smell doesn't travel through the garage and into the house) or a garden shed or something and use it plus the garden hose to clean yourself off. A skunk kit should contain, at the very least, large quantities of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide, Lemon Joy (probably any other soap detergent would work as well, but the guy who came up with the formula that I found in the magazine article in the 1990s preferred Lemon Joy so that's what we have in our kit), a bucket in which to mix it all together, a couple of towels, a couple of washcloths, and.....if you have properly planned ahead, maybe a couple of XL T-shirts and some elastic-waist shorts that any family member could put on so that they can leave their clothing outdoors. Having a spare dog leash in the kit helps so that you can keep the dog where you need him or her while you bathe them. Our dogs run in circles and fall on the ground and try to rub off the skunk smell, so without a leash, getting them deskunked is a battle. Sandals like flip flops can replace your stinky shoes. A ziplock bag stuffed with nitrile or latex medical gloves comes in handy if a skunk odor-free human is having to wash a skunked dog. The last thing you want to do is transfer that stinky smell to yourself. I have found it much easier to get the odor of skunk off people and pets than out of clothes and shoes, despite repeated washing with everything under the sun that might neutralize the smell, so we quit trying to save skunked clothing. Generally if someone takes a good hit of skunk, we just throw away their clothing and shoes because you just can't get the smell out of them. We even try to be careful about where we shoot a skunk because most of the time the skunk will release its scent upon being shot, and the scent will linger on the ground and in the air for weeks to sometimes months, so it is better to track a rabid skunk and shoot it some distance away from the house and garden if that is an option. (With a rabid skunk trying to attack a person or pet, you usually don't have that luxury though.) We haven't had too much trouble with being skunked, but I know people who once had a skunk get into their house, and met another family during a wildfire at their place whose dog had trapped and killed a skunk under their house. They told me that despite all their efforts to use every method found on the internet, their home still smelled strongly of skunk a couple of months later. I guess the scent traveled up through the floorboards (and I cannot imagine anything worse). The dog, who was a pit bull who "greeted" me when I got out of the fire tanker, didn't smell that strongly of skunk anymore, but they said their whole house still did. Here's the formula, which I am sure exists in a million different pages on the internet: Skunk Remedy

No, in this case, they wouldn't. It would be impossible to ID blurry, tiny balls of lint. Yes, they move about. They crawl like a beetle, and center in the center intersection of the leaves' bones. I took one of those suckers to a larger garden center today. This is going to be hard repeat. Evidently they're a very destructive, Sevin-immune mutation of a potato weevil. They call it a "Plant bug" because it hasn't officially been IDed. However, in our area, they're going wild. Ironically, the closest I could come to an online picture of them was a potato weevil! But since I don't grow edibles... Shoot. They gave me an insecticide I left in the car to use on them. They weren't surprised about the Sevin. The active ingredient was something like acetominifum-ipid. Obviously I'll have to go out and take a look and get back to you. I'll also report on its effectiveness. Truly, if I can get someone to take a picture for me, I will.

There are no repellents that work for armadillo, including castor oil, moth balls, hot pepper, predator urine, or salt. I'm not at all sure what the plant, Ricinus communis, is supposed to do. You have to be very careful about information gathered on the internet. I had a substantial den under my garden shed last year. We called a wildlife removal company as soon as we realized where the culprit was hanging out. They sent a guy out who constructed a barrier all around the shed, except for one area for it to be able to exit. In that pathway, he put a Havahart trap. After a day, the trap contained a dillo! The wildlife control guy put another trap in its place and caught another.....then another! After that, we put a permanent barrier up. University of Missouri armadillo information