Not the kitty!

I feed a couple of stray cats at work, and this is the second time a raccoon has taken advantage of the free food. I think it's cute how he dips his paws in the water. And interesting how his eye shines different colors from the flash.

My mom did something like that. 2 years later she had >30 raccoons lined-up awaiting dinner each night... Sort became, well, a bit of a problem.

If you stop feeding the raccoons, they will eat the cats.

When I was little, we would come up to Vermont to visit my Uncle, who lived in the deep Woods. He had a family of Raccoons that were friendly, and would come every night to his Porch to get treated. It was great fun as a 8 Year Old to be able to feed them right from my Hands. Bits of Bread were the usual Snack.
I don't think I would feel too safe doing that nowadays, what with the Rabies and all that went through the Raccoons here awhile back, but it was a cool Experience to have had as a Kid.
I always loved how the Raccoons used their Paws like little Hands, and the cute noises they made.

TopRamen said:

When I was little, we would come up to Vermont to visit my Uncle, who lived in the deep Woods. He had a family of Raccoons that were friendly, and would come every night to his Porch to get treated. It was great fun as a 8 Year Old to be able to feed them right from my Hands. Bits of Bread were the usual Snack.
I don't think I would feel too safe doing that nowadays, what with the Rabies and all that went through the Raccoons here awhile back, but it was a cool Experience to have had as a Kid.
I always loved how the Raccoons used their Paws like little Hands, and the cute noises they made.

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That sounds fun!

Cute little guy. I had a friend in Central Texas that would have a group of 5 or so show up every night for dinner. They were funny as all heck to watch. They are so careful and deliberate. We'd sit out on the back porch and have a few beers watching the show they gave us. He'd go through a fair bit of cat food feeding the masked bandits.

About 25 years ago, my Dad called me about a kitten or something in his driveway that looked close to death. When I checked on it, it was a baby raccoon. I took it and nursed it back to health, feeding it milk and bread until it was old enough to eat solid food, then switched it to cat food. I built a 3x4 foot cage for it and would set its food and water in there for him... It was the funniest thing... I'd give him his food in an old coffee cup, and water in an old bowl. He would first go and wash his hands, then carefully dig through the entire cupful of cat food until he found THE biggest, most "perfect" piece of kibble he could find, then meticulously wash it in the water, and eat it. Then he'd do it again, seeking out the SECOND most perfect piece of kibble, wash it, and then eat it. Then he'd seek out the third, and on and on until he'd consumed all his food. By this time his water looked like some sort of nasty gravy, and he'd chatter and gesticulate to me that he wanted clean water. I'd reach in and remove the empty cup, pull the old bowl out and dump it, and run some fresh water in it from the spigot, and set it back in. Then he'd drink and maybe play in the water some.

Later when he got older, my Dad told me that they tend to get pretty aggressive when they reach breeding age if they're kept confined. So, I turned him out of the cage. Of course he hung around and lived around the place like a cat for some time...

More later! OL JR

Back in '77 I was out in the garage working under my car when I heard a noise. Rolled to my left and there was a young opossum, maybe 6 inches long, watching me. I said hello and got a handful of cat food from the house. It sat there and ate while I finished my work. That opossum decided it liked cat food, lived under Mom's house with a flock of feral cats for the next 15 years or so. Didn't hurt anything or bother anybody. One day there was roadkill in front of the house and she didn't see the opossum after that....

luke strawwalker said:

About 25 years ago, my Dad called me about a kitten or something in his driveway that looked close to death. When I checked on it, it was a baby raccoon. I took it and nursed it back to health, feeding it milk and bread until it was old enough to eat solid food, then switched it to cat food. I built a 3x4 foot cage for it and would set its food and water in there for him... It was the funniest thing... I'd give him his food in an old coffee cup, and water in an old bowl. He would first go and wash his hands, then carefully dig through the entire cupful of cat food until he found THE biggest, most "perfect" piece of kibble he could find, then meticulously wash it in the water, and eat it. Then he'd do it again, seeking out the SECOND most perfect piece of kibble, wash it, and then eat it. Then he'd seek out the third, and on and on until he'd consumed all his food. By this time his water looked like some sort of nasty gravy, and he'd chatter and gesticulate to me that he wanted clean water. I'd reach in and remove the empty cup, pull the old bowl out and dump it, and run some fresh water in it from the spigot, and set it back in. Then he'd drink and maybe play in the water some.

Later when he got older, my Dad told me that they tend to get pretty aggressive when they reach breeding age if they're kept confined. So, I turned him out of the cage. Of course he hung around and lived around the place like a cat for some time...

More later! OL JR

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So, I strarted letting him out of his cage to live free... he hung around, he'd come out to the shop while I was working on farm machinery... I was welding together parts for a trailer, and had a lot of red-hot steel cuttings and welded up steel laying around and the silly raccoon would come around and be picking stuff up, and I'd fuss at him, "Get outta there, you're gonna grab the wrong thing one of these times and when you pick up a piece of red hot steel, you're not gonna be happy!" He'd just cock his head to one side and make this sort of "RRrarwww" half-growl half raspberry sort of noise and kept doing what he was doing. One time I was working and heard a lot of digging and noise in the garage, and when I investigated I found him sitting on a shelf, dutifully digging through a jar of old cotter pins, looking for what, I don't know... looking for the largest, most perfect cotter pin I suppose... why I don't know... When I fussed at him, he just cocked his head and made his half growl half-raspberry disapproving, dismissing noise and continued about his business...

Finally after about a month of coming and going every night and day at will, he started only coming back every few days long enough to eat... Finally after another week or so he quit coming back at all... guess he found a girlfriend...

They grow up so fast... LOL

Later! OL JR

We found that when we were setting out cat food for the feral cats in the neighborhood, that the racoons learned that there was a free meal to be had. And so we would see them every night, peering in our back door, waiting for the food to be put out.

After that, we contacted the Dog Warden who said they would take a $90 deposit against a live trap cage, but if and when we caught one, state law specified that we could not transport it. They HAD to be called.

So we did. And they came. And came. and came.
One summer we netted 21 criters...the next season we started early, and scored 29 until the fall.
This year, we have not seen any at all.

But stink bugs in the fall.....let me tell you....

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...But stink bugs in the fall.....let me tell you....[/QUOTE]
Go on-tell us! What-the traps were smaller?, you'd get two at a time?, they quit coming after the 494th call?, they gave you the trap as a public service...what? Dying to know...

Kirk G said:

We found that when we were setting out cat food for the feral cats in the neighborhood, that the racoons learned that there was a free meal to be had. And so we would see them every night, peering in our back door, waiting for the food to be put out.

After that, we contacted the Dog Warden who said they would take a $90 deposit against a live trap cage, but if and when we caught one, state law specified that we could not transport it. They HAD to be called.

So we did. And they came. And came. and came.
One summer we netted 21 criters...the next season we started early, and scored 29 until the fall.
This year, we have not seen any at all.

But stink bugs in the fall.....let me tell you....

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Tell us about the BUGS!!!

Raccoons are both awsome and awful for the same reasons. They are very smart, they have clver dexterous hands, they are totally fearless, and they only care about número uno --- themselves.

I've mostly run into raccoons while backpacking. They have a certain amount of charm, but if they want what you have, like your food for the next week, they will not back down. You might think you can scare one off, but they will look you straight in the eye while the rummage through your stuff, and snarl at you the whole time. They can be really mean.

I had one super scruffy one come to my camp one time, lurking around the edge of camp, waiting for an opportunity to steal something. I started throwing little rocks near him, hoping to scare him off, but it didn't bother him one bit. Finally I decided I was going to get rid of this raccoon, and I threw a pretty big rock straight at him. I would not have liked to be hit with this big of a rock, but that raccoon just stood there, perfectly still, and he just let that rock bounce right off his head without even flinching! That's one tough old raccoon!

ThirstyBarbarian said:

Raccoons are both awsome and awful for the same reasons. They are very smart, they have clver dexterous hands, they are totally fearless, and they only care about número uno --- themselves.

I've mostly run into raccoons while backpacking. They have a certain amount of charm, but if they want what you have, like your food for the next week, they will not back down. You might think you can scare one off, but they will look you straight in the eye while the rummage through your stuff, and snarl at you the whole time. They can be really mean.

I had one super scruffy one come to my camp one time, lurking around the edge of camp, waiting for an opportunity to steal something. I started throwing little rocks near him, hoping to scare him off, but it didn't bother him one bit. Finally I decided I was going to get rid of this raccoon, and I threw a pretty big rock straight at him. I would not have liked to be hit with this big of a rock, but that raccoon just stood there, perfectly still, and he just let that rock bounce right off his head without even flinching! That's one tough old raccoon!

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Farmers used to store ear corn in corn cribs to dry, then empty the cribs in the spring when the corn was dry and shell it off the cob. Shelling the corn disturbed a whole lot of critters during the process, mainly mice, rats, and raccoons. Being farmers, they were high level pests. One time while helping the neighbors shell out a crib, we came across a very ornery raccoon. I had a three tine pitchfork to push the ears of corn out of the corners of the crib, and my only defense against any very ornery critters. There was a rather large raccoon we disturbed and apparently he wasn't happy. He started coming at me and I managed to stab him through the ribs with my pitchfork. I stabbed hard enough that the tine stuck in the wood wall. The whole time I was trying to get the fork out of the wall, the raccoon just glared at me, like "just wait until I get off of this tine, I'm gonna come over there and eat your head." Someone bumped me while I was just about to get the fork out of the wall, and both raccoon and pitchfork went down into the flowing ear corn. I heard faint yelling down below, and later during the break when we switched to the other side of the crib, the guys were ripping on me for losing my pitchfork. They said the raccoon managed to get un-impaled and toddled off very grumpily before they could finish him off. Now, I'll see you a tough old racoon and raise you, one tougher old raccoon...

Adrian

Back in the old days when I was a kid (teenager) we used to have 2-3 old double-row cotton pickers in the barn-- usually pulled out the best two and prepped them to pick cotton, with the third standing by as a backup. Well, we'd been running the machines and one went down, and so I grabbed the battery out of it and went down to the barn, popped it in, primed the fuel pump, inspected carefully for yellow jacket nests as I crawled up to the platform and cranked it up and drove it to the house and greased it right quick and dumped flush oil down it, checked the fluids, filled the water tank (that cleans the spindles as you pick), fueled up, and drove straight back to the field and started picking. Well, after making a few rounds, I noticed a door plugged up (the bottom of the door serves as the intake for the suction pipe that pulls the cotton up through the blower and then blows it into the big basket on top of the back of the machine). I stopped and crawled down and started cleaning the doors-- a front door on each of the two picker units, and a back door on each unit side by side underneath the machine, requiring one to virtually belly-crawl up under the axle to open the rear doors and clean the green bolls, any broken weeds, stuck wet cotton, bugs, fire ants, and other assorted detritus out of the doors... I climbed back out and came around the left side of the machine to clean the last front door... I opened it and pulled some wet cotton and a weed limb out from behind the stack of rubber doffers, which are basically a stack of lugged rubber disks cast onto aluminum "spider" backing plates, which rubs the cotton off the spindles as they pass underneath the lugs of the high speed spinning doffers... The door closed up against them, with a tall vertical opening in the door for clearance with the door closed, and a recessed opening in the door to allow the cotton that was flung out of the doffers to spin out away from them, hit the back of the door, and fall to the bottom of the door and into the suction airflow curving up the front half of the door and into the suction pipe mounted above it going up to the fans and into the basket. Because the spindles are constantly being wetted down and cleaned by moisture pads they rotate under before they reenter the row to pick more, and they're filled with flush oil that slowly slings out and builds up, catching stray lint and cotton, dirt and plant debris, etc. making a sticky, slimy mess that tends to be sprayed into the doors by the doffers, building up and eventually plugging up the door... SO I look into the picker door, and there's what appears to be a greasy, wet, nasty wad of cotton stuck in the top of the door, typical of what you'd see in a plugged door. I was just about to reach in there and pull it out when suddenly it turned on me and all I saw were snarling fangs and growling, hissing teeth... turns out it was no wad of wet nasty cotton, but a VERY PO'D raccoon! Evidently, he'd decided to make his home in the picker door or suction pipes, and when I started running the machine, the only place he could seek refuge was in the upper part of the door... where he was continually pelted by cotton bolls ejected at high speed from the spinning doffer stack right behind him. Also, his tail apparently got pulled through the small slot between the spinning doffer stack and the door, and the rubber lugs of the doffers stripped all the hair off his tail...

I instantly pulled my hand back, he hissed and growled and hit the ground running... I NEVER IN MY LIFE have seen ANYTHING run that fast... I'm talking CHEETAH fast... that thing hit the ground and literally was 100 yards down the field and running flat out in just a few seconds... I cleaned the rest of the junk out of the door and got back into the field.

He was NOT a happy camper!

Later! OL JR

Adrian and Luke --- good tough raccoon stories!

Has anyone seen the commercial for one of the eyeglasses companies where the lady apparently can't see all that well? She opens up the door to her yard, calls out to her kitty, and as this big scruffy raccoon walks into the house, she says, "Come have snuggles with mama!"