Per my previous post, I set the trap up inside with adequate spacing for the cats to go in and out of the house. Holding off on Tyler’s ‘put an egg on it’ advice for now, I placed a small container of cat food in the cage and set it for action. KayDee and Alex were out late attending the baseball fight so I went to sleep and where visions of trapped raccoons danced through my head.

A half hour or so later downstairs there arose such a clatter, I wearily woke up just enough to ask the returning KayDee what was the matter.

The raccoon was apparently in our house when they had come in the front door. Standing on his hind legs next to the cage, he challenged my wife and child for ownership of the house. Alex, flux with territorial pride after watching the Ems handily beat the visiting ‘Bears’ (which are basically large raccoons, right?) apparently lunged at the invading critter with his hands over his head roaring “Noooooo!” Reconsidering the risk/rewards of remaining, the animal turned and ran out the cat door.

The trap, I note, had somehow been set off already but sat empty.

KayDee reset it, but when I checked this morning I found it open and containing an empty container of cat food.

The raccoon had, apparently, come back in the middle of the night once things had gotten quiet and eaten the food in the trap. Somehow avoiding the trigger plate and with the delicate precision of a surgeon removing a live bomb from someone’s chest cavity, he apparently extracted every single little piece of cat food then strolled out the door.

For comparison sake, one of our tiny kittens was trapped in this a couple days ago when he set off the feather-light trigger, so this raccoon is an expert.

Tonight… I shall attempt again but with the food secured at the back. Hopefully, the awkwardly precarious posture needed to reach it will be his undoing.

(ed: at this point, my friends suggested I try baiting the trap with eggs.  “Ok”, I thought.  I’ll try that.  Tonight.)

Raccoonwars update: I bought a trap yesterday and emplaced it in front of the cat door last night. To prevent our own cats from being suddenly captured, we locked them all in our bedroom. “They won’t mind, right?” KayDee and I rhetorically asked each other while avoiding eye contact (as we knew our words rang false).

The cats, as it turned out, did in fact mind. Quite a bit. Last night’s sleep was punctuated with occasional bouts of plaintive meowing, hissing (they did not appreciate being stuck next to the new kittens which they see as interlopers), and a steady monotonous scratching at the locked bedroom catdoor which had betrayed them by cutting off their easy escape.

Meanwhile, the raccoon chose last night to skip our house. Whether he stuck his head in and recognized the baited trap for what it was or reads Facebook and knew what was in the works, he/she was not in the case at 3AM when I finally relented and let the cats free.

Tonight, we will try a modified strategy that involves NOT trying to prevent our cats from being dumb and getting caught in the cage. We’ll just leave the cage out and hope the Raccoon goes for it while our obnoxious ‘cannot-let-Ben-sleep’ cats skip it. After last night, I can’t really build up a huge head of concern at the thought that one or both of the cats might end up trapped for a few hours in the cage, so it’s potentially one of those ‘win win’ situations.

We shall see.