March 2nd, 2010
Minnesota
This past fall our neighborhood developed quite a raccoon problem. Especially around our garbage cans and our neighbor’s corn stand. In one night those critters ate nearly half the rows of sweet corn and stomped all over the rest of the garden! So, we went to work to get rid of them but tried to do it as humanely as possible. After all, these little guys were just looking for food and didn’t really mean to wreck the garden.
My neighbor and I went down to the hardware store and bought a cage trap designed to catch the critter without harming him. That night we baited it with a nice big blob of peanut butter. Then we waited. Sure enough, before I even went to bed that night, we’d caught a raccoon! He was not happy about being stuck in the trap but he was also super-feisty and unharmed. I was so glad all I had to do was pick up the cage, put it in the back of the pickup and take him for a drive. Once we got to the country, we set the cage on the edge of the road and opened the door. He took off for the woods and hopefully won’t come back to the city for awhile. I can’t imagine if we’d killed him or hurt him – that would have been awful to see and deal with.
Over the next few weeks we kept the trap set and caught two more raccoons – and released them in the same area as the first one. Since then, we haven’t had any problems but I’m keeping the trap ready just in case.
Julie Fryer
Minnesota