Listen at night for possum thumps on the roof or for the screeching and gurgling sounds of their nocturnal antics. Fact of the matter is, the things would as soon eat Pocahontas’ face off as dance around the forest. Do slugs eat tomatoes? I promptly called animal control and was told I could have a cage to catch it with… in about 3 weeks… if I was lucky. They are not cute, they are not nice. I have my garden netted to keep out the birds that were after other fruit, but nothing ever went after my tomatoes. I redid the netting so that it better protected the tomato side, but still last night something bit into another tomato. Possums will be your number one suspect. Today, the ripe tomato is gone, and there are just a few pieces of red tomato skin and some tomato seeds about a … Do you need to get rid of rats that are eating your tomatoes? If big chunks have disappeared, then clearly a large animal has been at work. Anyway, all sorts of animals really do enjoy a tasty, ripe, garden-grown tomato – arguably as much as we humans do. While tomatoes are a member of the nightshade family, and their leaves are toxic and irritating to us, there are still plenty of animals that will eat them. Obviously the type of animals that eat tomato plants depends on where the tomato plants are. They are wild animals, not stuffed animals. What animal/pest can be eating ripe tomatoes at night? The best way I’ve found to deal with this is to pick the tomatoes as soon as they start showing *any* color. the only slug that will eat tomatoes is an african land snail any other slug will not eat tomatoes. The birds eat some of our tomatoes. A: All sorts of animals love ripe tomatoes almost as much as people, especially squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, raccoons, deer and birds. Birds seem to eat tomatoes on a whim, unlike berries, sunflowers etc. They’ll ripen just fine indoors inside a brown paper bag, and won’t taste any different than vine-ripened. We’re out in the yard in the evening, Husband lets his four dogs out to run, and the little Brittany spaniel runs over to the tomatoes, grabs a HUGE green tomato and, before we can move, eats it! They’ll laser on a nice red ripe one and peck out a portion of it. Cats tend to eat at night too; Lions hunt at night. But now that they've started to ripen something is eating them. Tomatoes are a favorite of not only humans but also insects, birds and other wildlife, including small rodents like squirrels, chipmunks and rats. Keeping animals out of tomato plants can be difficult, and methods vary depending on the animal. Some animals, like woodchucks, destroy tomato plants in the process of taking the fruit. 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