Did the lasers come from the ACME company?
The eyes…can’t look away…
Adorable and cute, but I’ll add to the noise - don’t feed them. They make very bad neighbors - and you aren’t doing them any favors either.
I grew up in the sticks with lots of critters around, including raccoons. Some of my friends and neighbors would try and domesticate the orphaned or injured, and it rarely ever worked out very well for either party. My parents encouraged me to satisfy my youthful urges to have a pet raccoon, or a pet otter, or a pet quail by reading books like Frosty: A Raccoon to Remember, Ring of Brightwater, That Quail Robert and the like.
With my Mom’s help I once raised a pair of baby jack rabbits that had been “orphaned” (read: found by kid in my class who was quite find of shooting rabbits with his Dad on the weekends). We bottle fed them and got them to the point of eating solid food and about 1/2 grown and then let them go in the forests that surround our house in the boonies. I have no idea if they had any chance of living normal jack rabbit lives, but they had more of a chance than when they were just sucklings.
Anywho, sorry for the tangent, but for anyone reading who loves raccoons and has kids, Frosty is a great book.
Screw racoons. My ex-girlfriend would NOT listen to me and left cat food out for the poor widdle stray kitty-witties (but they’re hungry!), and of course we had a new coon friend within a week. I chased him around with a pole screaming like a madman for a week until he either decided to give up or come at hours when I wasn’t awake. I got a reprimand from the apartment manager for waking up the neighbors with all my hootin’ and hollerin’ and general hootenanyin’, but god damn was it fun.
A few years ago, my cat escaped. I went door to door looking for him. A few houses down the street, the lady said she was very sorry to have to tell me a raccoon ate my kitty in her back yard. She watched, in horror from inside her kitchen.
They aren’t nice or cute, IMO.
Ever heard a racoon stuck in a dumpster? It sounds like Linda Blair in the Exorcist fighting it out with Sam Kinison and Pee Wee Herman.
That has got to be one of the most frighteningly accurate descriptions of raccoon shrieks I have ever heard.
:eek: She didn’t think to maybe, I dunno, turn on the hose so the raccoon would stop eating what is clearly someone’s pet?
I’m kind of jealous. I’ve never actually seen a raccoon. Up at my university, their ecological niche seems to have been taken up by other critters: the ravens destroy trash cans and set off car alarms for their own amusement, the skunks smell funny and chase humans away from the footpaths, and the foxes like to nest under porches and make a racket when you try to shoo them out. Oh, and the bats take care of our yearly quota of rabies cases.
I’d love to see all of these stellar qualities combined in one creature, just once. I imagine it wouldn’t take too long for this sort of super-animal to discourage the freshmen from going after the local fauna with squirt guns. 
DiosaBellissima, I think you may be being too hard on her. Full-grown raccoons are not small: they’re a match for many dogs, let alone cats. I’m not sure I’d want to confront an enraged raccoon, myself.
Also the shock may well have simply paralyzed her. It happens. Unless people are trained in dealing with crisis situations most people’s first reaction to any kind of shocking event is to freeze.
Given that she said that the raccoon was eating the cat I don’t think that confronting the raccoon would have saved the cat. With nothing to be gained, and some real risks involved, I don’t think I’d have tried confronting that raccoon, myself.
As a Torontonian I’ll echo what **Malthus **posted above.
I love raccoons. Love love love them. They really are amazingly intelligent creatures. So I can’t really hold it against them that they’re such jerks to us humans - I probably would be too, if I was a raccoon.
But my love, while deep, is marked by respectful distance, periodic annoyance, and occasional terror.
Do not feed them, because it will only encourage them to cut a key to your home and start helping themselves to your groceries and getting comfy on the couch. And don’t think you can get rid of them with a squirt gun (or even a giant pit bull - trust me on this one.) I don’t know any other animal for whom it is LESS true that “he’s more scared of us than we are of him!”
All good points. I’ll be completely honest and say I’ve only ever seen a raccoon at the local “zoo”, so it’s true that I have no real experience with the buggers. I don’t even know if they are around here (Bakersfield, CA). We have lots of Kit foxes everywhere, but those certainly don’t eat cats- I see the cats at the apartment complex chasing them out every night.
Want to know what gave me a real laugh?
The fact that the series of movies based on Resident Evil takes place in a city known as “Raccoon City”. Which happens to have been filmed in … Toronto!
How appropriate is that?
Raccoons really are amazing animals - they are almost human-like in their intelligence, their ferocity, their tenacity and their dexterity. If they were rare, I’d be thrilled to bits seeing one in the wild. As it is … I’ve had my garbage “cooned” (meaning strewn all over the yard for inspection and selection of tasty bits), stuff stolen, yard grubbed up; I’ve chased them out of my garage; I’ve had sleep interrupted by their infernal screetching and fighting during mating season - a racket it is hard to believe; I’ve had to face them down and been damn near mugged by them in dark alleys (they only fear people if you are holding a stick or some other sort of weapon) …
That map can’t be right - it shows Vanvoucer Island as being raccoon-free, but I can tell you that that is definitely not the case.
:eek:
DEMON DOGS!!!
It wouldn’t have done any good. By the time she looked outside, Bartlett was dead. The raccoon might have turned on her, had she gone outside.
This one includes Vancouver Island in their range. Perhaps it argued by some mammalogists that they were introduced there?
My parents had a family of raccoons living in their chimney. Thank god they didn’t use the fireplace! We have (had) a family in a partially dead tree in our side yard. They are devious demons of garbage–I can’t stand the critters. I used to think they looked cute. But cleaning up garbage more than once got me over that.