With much attention today on hot industry topics — from major storm resilience to cyber threats — it is easy to overlook a seemingly less menacing threat to the electric grid, one that is preventable and represents up to 20 percent of all outages caused by animal contact. Why is it difficult to focus on eliminating animal-caused outages? Animals cause electric power outages when they bridge energized equipment, resulting in a short circuit — and it is not due to a lack of knowledge that these outages occur as frequently as they do. Recently, utilities have increased their focus on drivers of reliable power supply because the impact of outages today can exceed millions of dollars of damages both to customers and to their own facilities.