We had our neighbors, Rick and Monica, over for dinner a few nights ago and we ate out on the deck. Monica spotted these raccoons in a tree behind our house and we watched them for a while. Monica said they can be vicious. She told us about a friend whose Irish Setter got in a fight with a raccoon near a pond in the woods and the raccoon almost drowned the dog. I started thinking about the Coon Hunting Convention that I played at outside Bloomington. I was in a working country band, playing two to three times a week in every American Legion, VFW, Elk’s, Eagle’s and Moose Club in southern Indiana and one of the strangest gigs was playing outdoors up on a flat bed trailer for coon hunters. As far as I knew they didn’t shoot the raccoons, they just “treed them” at night using dogs and flashlights.
Monica said the boys in her family used to go out after dinner to shoot ground hogs. They were a nuisance on two counts because they ate crops in the garden and they dug holes that horses might step in their holes and break their legs. Monica said she never ate a raccoon but she did eat squirrel one time. She couldn’t remember what it tasted like other than it was full of buckshot.
This morning I was reading the paper out back when Stella, our white kitty who only goes out for a few minutes in the morning to go to the bathroom, came face to face with one of the raccoons. I broke up the encounter but now feel like I’m going to have to borrow Leo’s Have-A-Heart trap to catch these guys and have Animal Control haul them off. I watched a video last night on how this all goes down. The exterminator in the video recommended peanut butter and jelly as bait.
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Raccoons LOVE dry cat food, so if Stella’s food dish is anywhere near a porch screen, it will probably be lured towards it. The have a heart thing is a good idea, but the town guys aren’t always available to pick them up, like on weekends.
Did I ever tell you about the raccoon in my house experience?
The cat food thing definitely works. We had a nutty lady in our old neighborhood in the city who thought she was feeding the feral cats and instead she attracted a pack of raccoons who staked out all her feeding stations. They were cute little opportunists and scarily fearless. Neighbors would confront the lady and tell her she was just attracting the raccoons and she would hold up the bag and point to the label and reply, “But it’s cat food.”
Our raccoons seem to be part of the family; they’ll eat kibble on the bamboo coffee table under the carport even if B is a foot away. My weightwatchers book says one ounce of cooked raccoon is 1 point.
did you exterminate them? (The exterminator in the video…)
I thought i was feeding coons in my back yard and it turns out the neighbors cats were devouring the food before the coons had a chance. Guess i’ll have to feed them in shifts.
that’s pretty funny story Rich, made me laugh…