No, silly, you put his tail on your car radio antenna!
I think the plastic carpet runner was a good idea but the points need to be closer together. Raccoons have very sensitive feet but they’re relatively small. If you could find something that had points maybe a half inch apart, you may be on to something that will deter them.
Or maybe you could tack some Contact Paper, sticky side up, along the fence. Boy, I bet a coon would hate the feel of that on their little tootsies! The more I think about this, the more I like it. And Dollar Tree carries it, so if it doesn’t work, you’ve only lost a buck.
You might want to have a look at this PBS documentary, Raccoon Nation. I saw it last year and what impressed me the most was that some researchers discovered that urban raccoons only have a territory of about three blocks. With their notoriously bad eyesight, they’ve apparently learned not to cross busy streets, hence the limited area in which they roam. So, if you eventually have to go the live trap route and take him to a more racoon-friendly area, you’re pretty much guaranteed that you won’t be seeing him again.
And I’m thinking you could bait it with an egg secured with tape (or leftover Contact Paper.) Raccoons love eggs but the neighbor’s cats probably wouldn’t be interested, since they’re being well-fed elsewhere.
Indeed. It ain’t fair to say something hilarious and then forbid people to laugh! 
The idea is to keep them so well fed that they don’t need to eat your greens. Might work. Raccoons are partial to cheap dry cat food. Also set out water so they can wash their food. Then set up a web cam and rake in the money from your advertisers.
You could try talking to animal control. They could loan you some traps, maybe. I don’t know what animal control is like in SF. You’ll probably need to do this yearly, but it will work in the short term.
You could try the coyote urine but I have my doubts, absent any actual coyotes. Raccoon are smart. Plus, now your greens smell like coyote urine. Ugh.
I’d go with the cat food and hope that the raccoon keep the opossums at bay.
Just be thankful you don’t have an Armadillo problem.
Seriously, if the pepper doesn’t work, call pest control. Go straight to live trap and removal.
My dogs worked great, but since that’s not an option, pest control. It’s worth the membership fee to get a good referral from Angie’s List.
Urban 'coons tend to be fearless. I’ve only had real trouble with them once, when we used to leave food outside for our dogs (they seemed to prefer to eat outside, no one knows why). The 'coons would muscle my large dogs right out of the way to get to that food. But once we stopped the outside feeding, eventually they got tired of all that work for no reward and departed for greener pastures. But you can’t bring your garden indoors.
A friend of mine told me she’d had success by leaving an old portable radio on at night near her garden, tuned to a talk show. Urban raccoons will generally be deterred by the sound of people talking, even if they can’t see them. Couldn’t hurt to try it, and it’s a least-cost alternative if it does work for you.
Did you check UCDavis? <a href=“Raccoons / Home and Landscape / UC Statewide IPM Program (UC IPM)”>Raccoons Management Guidelines–UC IPM</a> - Pests in Gardens and Landscapes Raccoons
Sorry, don’t know how to bbcode it.
BTW, Davis has a lot of useful things.
They make electric poultry netting that you could fence your garden with, maybe?
http://www.strombergschickens.com/product/Positive-Negative-Poultry-Fencing/Electric-Poultry-Fences
This kind doesn’t need a ground rod, and isn’t crazy expensive. The zap isn’t injurious to people or animals, but it is a darned good deterrent.
There are also motion sensor water spray things, sort of like a high power sprinkler jet that may or may not work in your situation. There’s a bunch out there, but here’s one:
Thanks for some very helpful suggestions, **Hopeful Crow **et al. The carpet runner I found does have the points close together, I measured them and they are 1/2" apart.
**Merneith **and others, they are not digging up plants to eat the plants. They are digging around in the garden maybe looking for things to eat but not really finding them (unless they’re eating worms or something). I don’t currently grow food plants anyway, but I planted a podocarpus and they nearly dug it out of the ground. So I don’t want to satisfy them, I want them to just stay away.
They already go to at least one of the neighbors, they start there and then come to my place via the convenient deck closeness. I can see the tracks and that’s the direction they go in.
Question: does anyone know if raccoons make a sound and if so what they sound like? Sometimes I hear this sort of grunting noise outside at night, but by the time I get to the window I can’t see anything.
Raccoons can make all kinds of noises, from chattering to howls, but yes, they do grunt sometimes.
Give up!
Never!
You could train a team of special ops racoons to infiltrate the rogue faction and undermine their regime from within…and then install a puppet democracy within the 'coon nation that is friendly to your interests in the area. I don’t see how this could fail.
That just might work. Coons aren’t especially social creatures so, if you can get one on your side, it could keep the rogue agents away. They are tamable if you get one extremely young and raise it as your own. I have known several people that have done that including my father. If you could get a very young cub that will eventually grow into a large male and treat it well, he could protect you and your property plus make a really cute companion even though that is illegal as hell just about everywhere so you would need a disguise for him.
I know said you are allergic to dogs but there are breeds that are bred and trained to do nothing other than chase and tree coons. Black and Tan Coonhounds, Walkers, [Blueticks](Walkers,Black and tans,Blueticks,Redbones,Catahoula curs), Redbones and Catahoula Curs. You wouldn’t have to own one yourself.
There has to be some rednecks within driving distance of San Francisco that could camp in your yard with their dogs for the chance to tree some prime fat urban coon. Your neighbors won’t like it because those dogs bark and bay continuously until you get the coon out of the tree somehow but you can pull them off if the police calls get to be too much. The baying of those breeds can literally carry for miles so it would make for a good show. I do love the image of backwoods types treeing coons in the middle of San Francisco however.
I’m sorry, you presented us with an almost unsolvable problem based on the constraints introduced. You have little idea what you are up against unless you are willing to bend to some more desperate measures but I wish you the best of luck regardless.
Everyone says how smart they are but damn, they get greased on the highway more than any other animal except maybe groundhogs. So there… put a highway through your garden. Problem solved!
Make it a toll road, and it’ll pay for itself! Eventually. Maybe. If it went anywhere worth the toll. To anyone.
This looks like a very sensible idea.
I’ve heard good things about the cayenne pepper and those water spray things. I would also recommend putting some high capsaicin liquidalong the tops of the fences and bannisters they walk on.
It’s a good idea to call animal control though, you never know what services might be available to you.
That might work depending on the configuration but they may very well outsmart it too. I stay with my aunt and uncle every summer in the middle of Colorado Springs, CO and they have a serious problem with mule deer eating their garden combined with the occasional bear and mountain lion that want to hang out in their yard and that isn’t good when you have both kids and dogs around. My uncle is a retired psychiatrist that is about the most mild-mannered person you could ever know but the semi-urban wildlife explosion was driving him, their whole family and the dogs insane.
His solution was to get a slingshot with heavy pellets and just start shooting them in the rump. It hurts them but it doesn’t cause any real damage. I was sitting in his backyard a couple of years ago when a very large mule deer just walked right up and started eating like she owned the place. I asked for the slingshot, walked within 15 feet of her while she was giving me the stink-eye and I popped her right in the rump with with a heavy pellet. She let out a deer scream and ran off at least for the time-being. My uncle has to target the bears from windows inside the house. The get pissed and leave too but they eventually get brave again and come back.
The basic problem is that there are a number of species that thrive around human habitation. Rats, mice and cockroaches have always been among those but severe limits on hunting in urban and suburban areas create the same problem for larger animals especially deer but also coyotes, bears, and raccoons. They thrive around human habitation and their numbers only grow if they aren’t regularly culled.
Deer are the most common problem in the Northeast and their populations are out of control in the Boston suburbs and elsewhere. They are the primary vector for Lyme disease and they cause over $2 billion in vehicle damage and about 200 deaths per year through vehicle accidents because the dumb shits will literally jump right out in front of a vehicle before the driver has any time to react. I barely missed that type of accident several times myself but one was especially close.
The only larger animal that I have killed with my vehicle was a raccoon. They are extremely smart in their own classroom type situations but they don’t have street-smarts literally speaking and their eyesight is very poor so they will also run right out in front of a moving car without even realizing it. The good news is that they are small enough that they won’t hurt your vehicle very much. The bad news is that they really are that intelligent and they don’t always die on impact. The one that I hit was fatally injured but not dead yet. It made sounds that I never want to hear again so I had to make the decision to back over its head to put it out of its misery.
A low powered BB gun might work as well. Something like a Daisy Red Rider can’t cause mush damage to anything but it has great annoying potential for animals and even pesky neighbors.