Nice Little Racoon.

I like racoons.

I think they are cute and fun to watch. In fact, we have a family of 5 racoons who regularly check to see if we’ve left out any cat food on the back porch or inside the garage.

The back porch is more like a landing without a roof where we have a small cat house for our siamese cat, Edith. She seems to eat her fill and is pretty easy-going about sharing with the racoons. We have security cameras around the house, so every morning when I’m reviewing the video, I inevitably see the racoons climbing on the cat house checking the cat’s dish for left overs. Edith doesn’t seem to mind their visits because there is never a fight or squabble.

We also have Pickles and Spot who are our two black cats who live outside. They have a box with a bed inside the garage. There is also a little kitty door in the garage door so that they can get in and out.

Again, I see the racoons coming and going from the garage almost every night. On top of that are the opossums which go in the garage looking for cat food as well. On occasion, I will pull my truck into the garage at night and catch an opossum inside. They generally freeze in the headlights until I shut off the truck and then they scramble for the door.

Sometimes we’ll have leftovers and place the dish in the garage or out in the front yard near the bird feeders. We have deer and fox who also visit and will come around at night looking for a snack.

As a person with a college biology degree and many years experience in wildlife management, I completely understand those of you who are reading this and yelling don’t feed human food to wildlife. When you feed them they lose their fear of being around humans, plus human food is not as nutritious for the animals. After all, I was never taught that opossums thrive in the wild on macaroni and cheese.

We simply love the wildlife in our area and do whatever we can think of to attract them. We never have close contact with them, other than the scared little opossum I surprised in the garage.

Over the years my experience with racoons has had its ups and downs.

I remember one sunny and warm spring afternoon when I was a game warden. I got a call that a lady was having problems with a racoon at her house. I responded to the call and met the lady, who lived in the country northeast of Topeka.

She had a boy and girl who appeared to be grade school age. I met her at the front door and she told me they had a racoon who was acting very strangely. I pressed herr for more details and she said that the racoon had tried to get inside their house through the back door. He couldn’t get through the screen and so he had attached himself to the screen on the upper half of the door.

As you know, racoons can be infected with rabies and one of the first signs of a sick animal is that they do things they don’t normally do. In the case of this racoon, it was out in the middle of the afternoon and out in the open. Racoons normally like to be nocturnal and aren’t known for trying to rip open a screen door. Normally the presence of the children running around would scare a racoon off.

The lady was a young lady and attractive, so I will admit that I wanted to put on a good show for her. I wanted her to tell her friends and family what a manly and professional officer the game warden had been.

So I wanted this to all go as smoothly and seriously as possible. I was trying to impress her by taking the entire situation as a dangerous situation that required all my years of professional wildlife experience to handle.

So I asked where the racoon was presently located and she led me around the house to the back porch. Sure enough, there was a small, probably young, racoon. It appeared to have clawed its way up the screen door. It had clamped itself to the screen door about shoulder height. When I made noise, it sort of looked at me and then looked away. It was definitely sick, because it didn’t seem to care that I was there.

I told the nice lady that I would have to remove it because it appeared to be sick, based on its very odd behavior. The lady agreed, but asked that if I had to put down the animal, she would appreciate it being done somewhere else so that her kids didn’t have to see it. They still thought it was a cool little visitor they had.

It is common to perform “animal control” work as a game warden. We step in when there is a nuisance wildlife complaint and try to remove the problem.

The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks expected me to do this without any proper equipment for catching or controlling nuisance animals. It was up to me to exhibit my professionalism and high level of training in front of this young family.

I examined the racoon from a few feet away and told the family to stand back. I would take care of things and be out of their way in just a few minutes. Meanwhile I was wondering to myself as to how in the world I could get this racoon off the screen door without hurting it in front of the children.

I finally decided that if I could pry it from the screen, then maybe I could scoop it up with a shovel or even get a bag over it. It was acting so lethargic and barely moving that it looked like getting him into a large sack would be easy.

No problem. I had this under control.

First I had to pry him off and the only tool I had was an asp baton. These are collapsible steel batons that are only about 6 inches long and hang on your gun belt.

I pull my baton out of its holder and gave it a flick which caused it to expand to about 18 inches. We were trained in using it as a less-than-lethal tool when apprehending a criminal. So I slowly approached the racoon with my metal baton. He didn’t seem to pay any attention to my presence, so I thought this was going to turn out as easy as could be.

I took the baton and pushed it between the animal and the screen in an attempt to pry it off the screen and onto the ground. When I pulled back on the baton it caused the racoon to let go of the screen, but instead of falling to the ground as I expected, things took an unexpected turn.

The racoon let go of the screen and jumped onto my hand holding the baton. It was almost a ninja kind of jump and spin motion that surprised me so much that I dropped the baton.

The racoon was now attached to my right hand and arm……I held it out as far away from my body as possible and did a series of flinging motions to try and get him off my arm. The lady just stared and her eyes bulged out like large moons and both kids began wildly screaming.

I kept trying to fling the racoon off my arm while running in a circle about the backyard.

Panic?…….I’d say so.

During all this the Racoon seemed to attack my hand and arm. He had become a sort of little demon grabbing, scratching and biting me. In my mind he looked like a cartoon Tasmanian devil whirling about my hand and arm making a sort of gnawing noise, naw, naw, naw, naw. All during this time I was running around in a circle trying to fling him from my arm. In the background were the mom and kids screaming and running about. I won’t comment on my choice of words. Actually, they may have been more like yells or screams also. After all, I was being eaten by this cute little racoon who turned out to be some sort of masked demon.

After what seemed like an eternity I was able to flip the racoon off of my arm. I was then able to scoop him up with a shovel and put him in the bed of my pickup. I probably should have checked to see if the family required trauma counseling after everything they had heard and seen. Mom not wanting to scare or upset the kids had gone right out the door.

I will never forget that little animal attacking my arm and making that little yaw, yaw, yaw, yaw noise as he bit and scratched me repeatedly. He looked like a whirlwind as he moved around my arm.

In hindsight, I think I was the one who needed trauma counseling. I was shaking from the adrenaline as I drove from the house. I had definitely made the family wonder about my sanity as I left.

I took, the now calm, racoon down the road about a mile and dispatched it with my sidearm. This was my plan originally. An orderly recovery without stress or drama.

I then had to go tell my supervisor, who went between hysterical laughter and supervisory seriousness.

The good part is that Wildlife and Parks got me a catchpole for grabbing animals. It was the same tool that animal control officers use. I could now get ahold of them using a metal pole with a metal loop on the end.

The down side was that I had multiple scratches and bites on my right hand and arm. Unfortunately, this meant I had to go through the whole series of shots for rabies. It took several return trips to the doctor to complete the entire treatment.

To this day I like racoons, but I keep my distance.

After all, no one should be traumatized by the sight a game warden running around in a circle cussing and screaming like a little sissy, while all the time a racoon is going naw, naw, naw, naw on his arm.