Or would that be ‘The Raccoonity’?
A fierce group of raccoons has killed 10 cats, attacked a small dog and bitten at least one pet owner who had to get rabies shots, residents of Olympia say.
Some have taken to carrying pepper spray to ward off the masked marauders and the woman who was bitten now carries an iron pipe when she goes outside at night.
“It’s a new breed,” said Tamara Keeton, who with Kari Hall started a raccoon watch after an emotional neighborhood meeting drew 40 people. “They’re urban raccoons, and they’re not afraid.”
Of course they’re not afraid. It is pretty much illegal to kill the bastards within any moderately sized townsip in this state unless they’re attacking you directly. They can be tearing your family pet a new asshole and you still can’t do anything except call animal control (who go off-duty at 5pm, thank you very much).
Your only legal option is to pay a professional trapper (approximate cost $500 each animal) to live-trap and “relocate” them. This solution, if there isn’t a family of them to replace the “relocated” member, only lasts about two weeks before the thing finds its way back to your locale, smarter than before and pissed off about not being given bus fare for the ride home.
I’ve got two solutions
1: Paintball gun – Even if you don’t freeze the paintballs to increase the sting factor, you can paint the little bastards from head to toe before they get out of your yard.
Initial investment $50-75. Little to no training necessary. Pretty effective, but not 100%
2: Crossbow pistol – its your property and what the man with the badge don’t know, won’t hurt him.
initial investment $50-75. You’ll want to practice in your basement or garage over a weekend or two. It is as effective as you are accurate. Don’t go chasing after your bolts. A wounded/dying raccoon will still mess you up enough so that you’ll have to go to the ER. Buy extra bolts at initial purchase.
If you have another solution (remember, city limits rules frown on the discharging of firearms), please feel free to leave it in the comments section.
After all, RNS is all about solutions.
A wrist rocket slingshot would give ’em something to think about if you’re good with it.
As would any dog that hasn’t had its hunting/predator instinct completely bred out.
Do local laws prohibit air rifles? A .177 or .22 pellet to the head from a distance would likely stun a raccoon so you could walk over and administer the coup de grace.
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we have similar restrictions on firearm discharge in most localities. That aside, I’ve heard that lots of folks take out backyard varmints with the Aguila Colibri or Super Colibri .22 Shorts, which have no gunpowder. They are in many instances quieter than pellet air rifles or BB guns, depending on what you use to launch them. Head shots are quite doable.
A wrist rocket hit anywhere but on the head, in the eye is not going to be effective, unless followed up immediately by a banzai charge with club.
This might work better:
http://www.sportsmansguide.com/cb/cb.asp?a=274553
It’s a Beeman 1,000 fps air rifle in .177. Using Beeman coated pellets will get it up to 1,200 fps.
Spendy little puffer, costs $220, but quality always costs.
The other solution would be a CB cap in a .22 rifle. If you make a practice of shooting the legal crackerballs around your yard with above writst rocket, when you want to shoot a CB cap, the noise is about the same.
If you get an inquisitive neighbor or even the gendarmes, you can show them the CB cap mess and say that you are just trying to discourage the predators, not kill them, after all, this IS Olympia, isn’t it?
How ’bout one of these AirForce beauties? It almost makes you want to go get some racoons so you’ve got a reason to get one!
……Mr. C.
(If the link doesn’t work right, just cut-n-paaste it!)
Hmmm….
It dropped the link completely!
http://mrcompletely.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_mrcompletely_archive.html#114731946667149651
Maybe this will work?
…… Mr. C.
CB Long in a bolt action .22.
Hav-a-Hart trap and garbage can full of water.
Benjamin .22 pellet gun to the noggin.
Just some ideas from someone who has fought the feral raccoon war before.
DIY traps are usually legal and aren’t too difficult. I’ve made ones intended for wild pig for less than 60 USD. Of course, I’m sure accidents always happen.
If you do kill them, do so humanely, and skin the corpse if you’re proficient with a knife. Racoon pelts are still valuable, as the fur is very highquality (if not long lasting). Meat smells funny and the fat tastes very… unpleasant… so I’d usually recommend leaving the rest of the animal for scavengers to keep the nutrients inside the local ecosystem.
I have caught a number of Racoons and Possums in our yard over the years. Canned cat food in a live trap works great. Feed stores or Farm supply stores have them. The risk is catching a cat. We tried the BB-guns, but live cage traps and a semi-psychotic Hungarian Vizla/Siberian Husky Tag team always won the day. The husky has since developed a taste for racoons and would flip the live traps over to get at the racoon inside. Needless to say, a number of cats dissappeared anyway. *urp*
I don’t know about Olympia, (or anywhere in Washington) but a lot of towns (including my county) regulate the discharge of air rifles the same way they do guns. Slingshot or paintball gun is probably the way to go. Neither would be likely to be lethal, but they’d probably hurt enough to make the little bugger go scavenge somewhere else.
One of these might work …. heh.
My brother solved his coon problem with a paintball gun. Grubby little bastard would get up on the porch and scarf the dog’s food, but because the door had full lenght windows in it, he never could sneak up on the cook to nuke it.
So one night he strategically pre-positioned his paintball gun up-stairs, and when Mr. Coon showed up for his nightly snack, my brother eased up the stairs and out on the balcony and quietly leaned over the rail with the gun and busted the thief dead center on the top of his head between the ears which bounced his head off of the concrete and then lit his ass up all the way outta the yard to the tree line.
That’s been about two years ago and he hasn’t seen the coon since.
dammit, “coon” not “cook” and “length” not “lenght”…
preview is my friend….
How about some moth balls. Place a pie tin of fresh moth balls out every other night and they will stay away. Also works for getting them out of your chiminny.
Seriously, if you all want a hilarious read, along with a few bleeding hearts of course, go look at the article in The Olympian (theolympian.com), it was the cover story for Monday, the 21st.
I think you’ll literally laugh out loud at some of the 200 COMMENTS !!! submitted from as far away as the deep south. Picture “gangs” of marauding, chain smoking coons out to terrorize the neighborhood into submission, and the many solutions offered to bring this invasion under control!
I tell ya it’s a new Patrick McManus book in the making.
If you have a centerfire rifle chambered for a rimmed cartridge, a lead roundball of groove diameter propelled by a magnum primer and 3 or 4 grains of almost any pistol powder held to the back of the cartridge case.with a pinch of poly-fiber pillow filling will handle a ‘coon sized critter quite handily out to about fifty feet. Makes about as much noise as a cat sneezing. Interestingly, the Finns call this load a “Cat’s Sneeze.” It’s also nearly as much fun as a human can have with his clothes on. ‘Coons, possums, moles, and tree rats don’t share that view, however.
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