Attack of the 200-pound raccoons!

We have raccoons now.

There’s really nothing, in terms of wild animals, that our house hasn’t had as a regular visitor, except for the notable and mysterious absence of coyotes in my life. If you’re a regular reader of NextDoor (and if you’re not, what a lonely and empty life you’ve had) you’d get the impression that you can transverse this city by jumping joyfully from one coyote to the next, but in almost 30 years I’ve yet to see one in our part of town, where virtually every landmark is named after the coyote.

But every one of God’s other creatures has called our home home. Possums, of course, have enjoyed time at our house both in our head (bathroom) and on my head (while I was sleeping and dreaming about things crawling on my head).

Bees once spent about an entire season in the wall of our laundry room, where I left them alone, because bees are in short and dwindling supply and they need all the help they can get; but then bees beget bees and pretty soon our laundry room was more bee than laundry room, so I called out a gentle and loving bee man who hoovered them all up in a 45-gallon bag and drove them away in his Datsun pickup.

Every kind of rat and mouse/

Has lived inside our little house

And again I’ve tried to be a nonviolent and convivial host, spending every available dollar on rodent-control quackery and snake-oil product. Not one, not two, not four, but three different sonic repellents. Little boxes that supposedly emit sounds only vermin can hear and which drive them away faster than a carpetbagging piper.

Instead, the device’s dulcet tones served as an invitation to our attic (at best) as well as to other parts of the compound where they ate entire dishwashers and internet service providers.

I tried humane traps, which, apparently, rats and mice are hep to. I only caught squirrels who were rabidly irritated by the experience.

And there are certain scents which are supposedly bothersome to rats and mice, everything from mint to predator-related smells. Again, these products’ intended targets found the aromas soothing, addictive and appetite-enhancing.

So, once again, my laissez-faire system of pest control met with failure and subsequent violence in the form of old-fashioned hardware-store traps.

More. We’ve had ducks (Lisa was the female; we forget the drake’s name. Probably Drake) an Electro-Squirrel who got fried gnawing into a power line and hung there for weeks, a warning to his colleagues to stick to ruining our avocado crop and leave the electrical lines to Sparky.

And now raccoons. They came to our attention by rummaging around in our backyard late at night. It didn’t sound like shy possums gingerly poking around. It sounded more like a large cocktail party was going on, with bellicose drunks fighting and throwing one another in the bushes. Frankly, it was a little too terrifying for me to go and check out.

“Something’s in the backyard,” said my wife, totally needlessly. I acted like I was still asleep. Maybe she’ll get tired of poking me and go outside herself. That didn’t happen.

So I got up and went outside. Man of the house. I made a big deal out of rattling the gate, giving the drunks time to escape before I opened it. It worked. I heard the sound of a water buffalo stampeding over the fence, came back inside and told my wife it was nothing.

This kind of thing went on for a few nights before I decided to go ahead and face whatever hellish beast was nightly vandalizing the back yard (our back yard, like Gaul, is divided into three parts, the main section has the Barn complex with a bar, a spa and a bunch of grass, trees and bushes and a gate which is there for legal purposes and also to keep the dogs from going out and bringing back dead possums and various rodents).

Our dogs were at the gate at midnight, braying like coonhounds, and the drunks were banging around, knocking things over. I opened the gate without a warning noise and the dogs ran out to kill things.

There were two raccoons. Bandit and Rocky (unless you’ve heard of a raccoon being named anything else). One was hanging from a rafter in the Barn like a sloth and the other was glaring at us, like an Apache scout in an old western movie, from the roof of the garage. They each had to’ve weighed 200 pounds. Later, I looked up how big they get. Sixty pounds, tops, said the innernets, so clearly either the site was totally wrong or these were raccoon/rhinoceros hybrids. The more, shall we say, zaftig, of our two dogs weighs 70 pounds and he looked like a teacup chihuahua next to the sloth/raccoon.

The raccoons had thrown a party for themselves, having found Annie and Jasper’s hidden cache of Milk-Bones, and scattered crumbs all over the bar.

Moron. You’re not supposed to leave dog treats or any other kind of food out where wild animals, such as the mythical coyote, can get to it.

So I battened down the Milk-Bone box and tossed a blanket over it.

What’s next? Will they return, more cunning and slightly larger than ever? I’m not going to do anything about it except roll over and go back to sleep. Live and let live, is my philosophy regarding wild animals on our property.

That is unless, like most of the creatures who’ve abused my generous hospitality, they go too far. In that case, I’ll need bigger dogs.