A squirrel playing dentist? That’s nuts!
David and Mila Freiheit didn’t have a lot of faith in the squirrels at first.
Why leave something up to nature that drones had so ably handled in the past?
But in their quest for the creative, the Montreal father and daughter took a chance.
Mila sat patiently on one end of a Westmount park bench with a wobbly tooth in her mouth and a chunk of granola sitting opposite. Connecting the two: a line of dental floss.
As a squirrel hopped on the bench beside her, Mila took a familiar position, holding her mouth open.
In seconds, the squirrel darted off with the granola in its paws, and Mila’s wiggly tooth trailing behind it.
“The squirrel had dental precision,” David said.
It’s the eighth tooth she’s lost, though probably the most creative extraction thus far. In the past she and her dad have enlisted drones and toys to help with the removals.
The family also considered enlisting pets, but their old blind pug might be too slow, David said, and his parents’ 150-pound bull mastiff would be too fast.
Though none of her other teeth are wiggling, Mila is already brainstorming for next time.
Cut down a tree and let the fall pull out the tooth, she suggested. Or tie dental floss to a basketball and throw it in the net. But it’s a homemade bottle rocket that really sparks her interest. And she knows what she doesn’t want: her 2-year-old sister to have a pull. “No way,” Mila said. “Her hands aren’t the fastest. Or they’re too fast, or too slow.”
This was Mila’s “most bloodiest tooth ever,” she said, and the tooth fairy awarded extra points for creativity, leaving $10 instead of her standard $5 rate. Even though it was too dirty to leave under the pillow (she had to hang it on her doorknob instead,) it wasn’t her most untouchable. That honour is saved for the one she swallowed.
“I would literally check my poop for it,” she said. (Just a visual check, said dad.) When that didn’t work, they used a bead as a substitute for the tooth fairy.
David Freiheit, who works in business development after 10 years as a corporate lawyer, is an active YouTuber with over 10 million views on his Viva Frei channel.
What started in 2012 as a place to post videos of himself lip-synching while running obstacle courses in a suit has morphed to document his family’s adventures, experiments with drone/animal interactions and other lighthearted fare.
Squirrels became his calling card after one nabbed his GoPro, taking it into a tree and racking up over six million views of the resulting video.
But with a jealous little sister and another baby on the way, David says he needs to keep the creative juices flowing. “We have to hope technology changes so that there’s new ways to pull teeth in a few years,” he said.