Hell Hath No Fury Like a Racoon Scorned

I've had a lot of jobs growing up. Some of them, I even got paid for. As a youth I learned the value of hard work growing up on our small farm, working, playing and enjoying life as a pre-teen kid just like everybody else did, or so I thought. I got my weekly allowance for doing my chores which included taking care of the livestock, weeding the garden, mowing the lawn, doing dishes (my sisters were older and moved out by the time I was old enough to work so there was no such thing as "women's work" in our house), etc.

My family moved into the city shortly after I turned 13. A lot of new opportunities opened up for a hardworking youth such as myself. I had the opportunity to have a paper route, bake cookies and bag groceries at a local grocery store, and work at a nursery. During this time in the city, I missed my association with the pigs, cows and chickens we had growing up on the farm. My parents tried to make it less stressful on my brother and myself by letting us bring our dog and 2 cats "along for the ride." The dog kept digging holes and getting out and running away, after which my Dad decided he had paid enough pound fees and let the dog become someone else's problem. My cat had kittens, which mysteriously disappeared, probably taken by some bobcat, cougar, chicken hawk or other predator that I as an adolescent knew was lurking in the neighborhood. I'm not sure what happened to Nate's cat, but I know that it didn't enjoy the car ride to the new home.

My favorite past time when I wasn't playing sports, riding my bike, reading a book or working, was watching t.v. There were a lot of good shows like Grizzly Adams, The Beverly Hillbillies, Little House on the Prairie, and many others that had cast members interacting with animals. As a kid I wanted to be a scientist and work with animals and study their behavior. Watching shows like Grizzly Adams showed me how fun and nice it would be to have a 10' tall bear to watch my back when I'd go to school, shopping, or just hanging out in the neighborhood.

Mr. Adams had a knack for communicating with the animals and I kind of thought that I had the natural ability, too. Occasionally we would go on vacation to a favorite campground in Port Townsend, Washington. It was surrounded by lush vegetation and natural forestry in which a menagerie (I've been waiting for a long time to be able to use that word) of animals lived. It was during my vacations to Seattle and Port Townsend that I became aware of my animal telecommunication abilities (I had something that even the Dog Whisperer would envy) became evident as I fed flying seagulls from my fingers and as raccoons would visit the campsite and take Reese's pieces from our hands.

As I got older, went to college and moved out into the real world, I have had to find suitable employment to take care of my wife and children. I've had a variety of jobs including produce manager, landscaper, football official, etc. Currently, I'm leasing a retail nursery in Northern Utah where I get to have fun growing and selling plants (these are not the "medicinal" type plants that one has to look over their shoulder to grow). At the nursery, I have several buildings with different functions. For instance, we have the greenhouses with obvious functions of growing said plants. We have the "Rabbit Hutch" which stores all of our empty pots, seed trays, etc., although I have no reason why it is called the "Rabbit Hutch." There is even a Tuff Shed that has been constructed as the bathroom facility for the 4 acre nursery. There is a selling house where most of our plants are displayed to sell, along with potting soil, fertilizers and other chemicals a gardener would need. None of these buildings are so air-tight as to keep all animals out.

We have a building which houses our break room complete with a microwave and small refrigerator. I'm always hungry so I have kept quite a bit of food in the refrigerator so that I can snack on it throughout the day. I don't have time to drive into town to pick up some food, so I have to keep it stocked up. Occasionally we'd come into the break room to see the garbage knocked over and some of yesterdays chicken bones cleaned a bit cleaner. There are several stray cats that I have seen. We have an unwritten agreement that I won't kill them if they'll take care of the mice that keep eating my seeds. As long as the cats do their job, then I'm happy to have an employee pick up the occasional garbage can. After all, what else are employees for?

Well, one day, I had put quite a bit of food in the refrigerator, so that it was difficult to close the door (we are just talking about one of those small dorm fridges, not the king size ones at home). I shuffled things around and got the door to close and hold itself and left for the evening. The next morning, I came in to see that the door was open and some of the food scattered around. Not a big loss, as it is just a small refrigerator and only a few perishable items had gone bad. The drinks could be re-cooled, and I probably lost $.50 worth of electricity to the opened door. The fresh food had been scattered by what I thought was a cat. I merely cleaned it up and closed the door again.

The next morning, I came in to find the door open again. "What was going on here? That's gotta be some tough cat," I thought. Then I thought for a moment that it might be a disgruntled employee who I had to let go. Upon further investigation of the fridge, the magnetic strip that seals the door was all ripped off and chewed up. Just then, thoughts of "Wow, that's one big kitty!!!" popped into my head.

Well, now the refrigerator is inoperable as it can not close and keep cool inside. I go inside the selling house and find a bunch of bottles on the ground. Again I think, "Man this disgruntled employee is really starting to tick me off!!!" The bottles are plastic and easy to pick up, but one of them has the corner gnawed off and the contents are spilling out into the aisle. Either the disgruntled employee is really hungry and trying to show me that I need to hire him back to be able to buy food, or the killer cat that ripped up my fridge is also desperate enough to gnaw through plastic to get to Repels All, a chemical that is supposed to scare animals away from your flowerbeds. This happened the next night, as another bottle of Repels All gave its life to satisfy the big kitty. The description for Repels All says that animals take one sniff and it irritates their nasal passages and they leave. It even has a silhouette of all the animals it is supposed to repel. I looked at the ingredients and it appears that Repels All is made of ingredients that would attract all. Let's see, garlic, dried blood, and dried egg solids. Yep, that sounds like it would be something that would chase away any pest..., NOT!!!! Needless to say, I will not be stalking my shelves with anymore Repels All.

I told my situation to the property owner who ran the nursery the previous 3 years. He suggested that it might be a wild animal, and that he had caught a skunk in a trap one year. "Great!" I'm thinking as I'm contemplating my previous years as my brother had caught a skunk in a trap he set in the manure pile. It wasn't easy to get rid of the skunk, and the last thing I wanted was a trapped skunk in my nursery.

The owner brought over a trap and we set it up in the break room. He put a piece of paper with some bacon grease on it in the back of the trap. The next morning, the paper was eaten, but the trap was empty, and not even tripped. As I recall, there was a little note with the consumers request for the next day's dinner order. We tried again with a corn chip smothered with peanut butter. Evidently the animal had read the papers and was afraid of getting sick on peanut butter. The ants found it, however, and days and days went on without catching the thief.

Then, one morning, my wife calls me and says, "We caught your critter." Yes, it was a raccoon, cute and cuddly. Being nocturnal, it was curled up in a ball in the trap just sleeping and looking sweet and innocent as ever. By the way, what you can't get from t.v. is how bad an animal smells in real life. Wow, this thing had B.O. that would make the average Seinfeld fan smile. I called the owner and asked him what to do, and he told me how Animal Control would come and get the animal for a small fee, but he just hooked up his skunk to his ATV exhaust and euthanized it on Carbon Monoxide. That would be free and all I'd have to do is toss the animal in the dumpster or bury it on boot hill of the 4 acres (I'm sure I'd have to do this again).

Now we've all seen how cute and cuddly raccoons are and can be. Grizzly Adams always had raccoons helping him, and Elly Mae Clampet had raccoons, and even Walter 'Radar' O'Reily had a raccoon in his zoo on M*A*S*H. Evidently Utah raccoons have not watched t.v. When I picked up the cage, the raccoon immediately sprung into action. "Wow!!!!" This thing would probably give a wolverine a good fight. It snarled and grabbed at me and brought back childhood memories, not of Grizzly Adams or Elly Mae Clampett but of the Tasmanian Devil. It barked, it sputtered, it rattled around like the cat wrapped up in Christmas Vacation. The television shows had mis-led me all these years. Now what do I do?

I headed towards my truck to prepare to set up the "gas chamber." Two of my female employees asked what I was going to do, and they began begging and pleading for me not to kill it. I said, "I'm not going to kill it, the exhaust of the truck will."

I put it in the shade and of course being the soft hearted person that I am, I couldn't kill it. I thought, "I'll do it later," and went off to work. Later, when one of the employees was getting ready to quit for the day, she and the other employee approached me with a deal. They said they'd haul it off out into the country (don't you just love America?) and set it free. Well, I didn't want to kill it either, and I didn't want it to become someone else's problem, and I didn't want them to get hurt, so I showed them how the trap opperates and and let them pick it up so they could see how it would react, snarling and grabbing, etc. I told them to keep their fingers away from the openings and to run like heck when they opened it. They returned a half hour later with an empty trap. I gave them each 4 raspberry plants as a reward. I'm not sure I want to set the trap up again, as I'm running out of plants.

Next lesson, I'll probably find out the bunnys really do act like Monty Python's Holy Grail rabbit did.

No animals were harmed in the writing of this entry.