Here is the most common sense sounding advice I've heard about what bait is best to use. The advice was to use as bait whatever the animal was eating that you don't want it eating, sounds pretty simple in theory but what if you have no idea what the animal is actually eating but you just want it gone from your property. There are generally accepted to be three best baits for the three most common animals we try and trap, they are:
• Tennessee raccoons you should use marshmallows
• squirrels use whole peanuts still in the shell
• opossums cannot resist rotting meat



If you are after another Nashville species then it is best to find out what that species likes to eat but if you don't know and are in a hurry there are some things that I considered as all-purpose baits, they are peanut butter and cat food, if neither of them work in your pest animal is digging holes everywhere there is probably an armadillo, and I am afraid say armadillos are not attracted by any bait you can put up because they only eat things they themselves dig up, but the upside is, if you can figure out where the armadillo walks it will walk straight into a trap that you put across its path.

The whole idea of a bait is to increase your chances of capturing the Nashville animal you are after, you could try one of the many many commercially made baits that they seem to have less effect than a piece of ordinary food that the animal knows is edible. You also have to put a bait that is appropriate to the location of the trap. If there is plenty of apples and pears growing where you are then is doubtful animals as clever as raccoons will come after a piece of pineapple, mainly because unless they got it out of a garbage bin then it is highly doubtful they will even realize pineapple is food.

Every professional I talked to said the same thing, baiting of traps is purely a trial and error exercise because like us wild Tennessee animals have their own peculiar habits and tastes so what one raccoon would take is as a bait, the next raccoon won't even look at it. The actual location of the trap is believed by most professionals to be more important than the bait you are using.

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