Sometimes jays, crows, or ravens will pull out garlic, shallots, beans and peas that have just started.

If I leave my garlic unprotected, squirrels will dig in the beds to bury their acorns and hickory nuts. They don't eat any of the cloves or sprouts but I have found cloves sitting on top of the soil that they dug up while burying a nut. Now I cover the beds with chicken wire as soon as I am done planting and leave it on thru the winter to hold the mulch in place.

Total agreement with LoneJack regarding squirrels. While planting my garlic earlier this week, I pull out at least a dozen acorns that most certainly were buried by squirrels. Great idea about the chicken wire on top. I have some extra hardware cloth (wire mesh) and will cut that up and cover the garlic as soon as possible.

Sounds like you have both cutworms and squirrels. Adjacent or former lawn is notorious cutworm habitat. Cut off at the soil level but not eaten definitely sounds like cutworms. Dug out might be squirrels, but it also might be crows or jays.

Those squirrels can really put in overtime on burying nuts for winter. I found 2 pots dug into. When I went to empty the pots for fall cleanup, there must have been 60+ nuts between the 2 pots. I pray they stay away from my garlic bed.

I live too near the coast for squirrels, but something usualyl rummages around in the 18" containers where I plant my "insurance" crop. I use 2X4 wire and leave it on until after the cloves are well rooted--like LoneJack does. Use rocks and broken brick to weight the covers. Do not seem to have much problem w/garlic raised beds as the walls of the beds is too flimsy for bigger animals to crawl over. I have seen rats exiting my garden, but the worst they do there is plant plugs of grass from seed (looks like wheat or barley) stolen from the horses next door. They are stuck into the sides of the bed in a bunch where they do not bother the garlic, but of course I remove them.

Rats? I never thought of those, but quite some years ago, they got away from control on my parents farm and as the corn was shelled out in the corn crib they tunneled under my mother's kitchen garden. That year she got no sweet potatoes because the rats tunneled under the plants and ate the meat right out of the developing sweet potato skins. Rats will eat anything once they learn to including alliums, although it usually takes longer for them to develop a taste for the onion family.

If you see any rats, you got a lot of them, a whole lot more than you probably realize.

Yes, I have been a rural dweller for decades. Haven't had them eat onions, but went through some potatoes that were stored in an added on room and they tore them to bits, but did not appear to have eaten any. I have a good cat that keeps them at bay when and where she can reach them, but the ducts in my ceiling is out of bounds for her, unfortunately. Neighbors have had too many horses on their land and have taken care of the rat problem until recently. Not with horses, but I suspect w/poison.