Browsing through the blogs, I read a post from The Daily Brief by Radar about raccoons.

I have raccoon experience.

Back a bunch of years ago when I was still married to wife #1, the forces that be were clearing land for a developement. In doing so, they were bulldozing a lot of scrub and small trees, and my son and his friend found a nest of very young raccoons in a pile of debris piled for burning. They brought the babies home. We became foster parents of three tiny little babies, so young their eyes were still closed.

Wife #1 might have been a lot of things, but she had a mothering instinct beyond reproach. She undertook to raise the little ones. Apparently the stress was too much for one, but two of the three grew rapidly, eyes opened, they got to moving around, and we were now the parents of perhaps the cutest babies in the animal universe, baby raccoons.

Everybody loved them, except the cat. The cat took on the air of “you’ll see. This is NOT a good thing.”

We kept them in a big box for a while, removing them almost constantly for cuddling and attention. They competed with the cat for food, and they used the kitty’s litter box. And they were SOOOOOOO cute!

And destructive.

Leave the house with two cats inside, you return to find two cats lounging around on the sofa. Leave the house with two adolescent raccoons, and you return to a effect reminiscent of a small tornado. Raccoons are curious.

They got on the kitchen cabinet. We had four canisters there: flour, sugar, coffee and tea. The lids were off all four canisters. There was a single floury footprint. There was a single coffee footprint. There was a single torn teabag. And the sugar canister was empty. We had two young coons on a sugar jag. They’d apparently licked their paws, stuck them in the sugar, pulled paw out, licked the sugar off, and repeated until all the sugar was gone.

Wife cleaned up the mess, and we got out a more secure set of canisters. The next trip, we returned to the same two coons on a sugar jag, execept this time they were smirking, proud of passing the little raccoon IQ test.

We got a big cage, five feet high, five feet wide, and three feet thick. It had a human representation of raccoon paradise: a box to nest in, some tree limbs to climb and lounge on, food, water, a litter box. You’d have thought we’d sentenced them to Devil’s Island instead of a roomy cage in our living room. Every time somebody walked into the room, both little raccoons climbed up the side of the cage and extended their little arms and made little whimpery raccoon noises, begging to be held.

It was hard to turn such a request down. So you open the cage and withdraw two loving little raccoons. They snuggle, cradled in your arms while you give them the requisite belly skritches. They do that little coon chittering noise. You’re thinking, “Awwww, how aDOREable…” and then the little bastards jump down and run off for mischief, leaving you feeling badly used.

Raccoons like dens, too. We returned from one trip. The kitchen looked normal. We thought we’d reached milestone in human-raccoon relations. Then the wife went to her closet. That’s where the “babies” had decided to den up. Both the shelves in her closet were cleaned off, the contents pushed off the shelves and laying in disarray on the closet floor. And on each shelf was a happily sleeping raccoon.

Ultimately we gave both of them away. The last time I saw one, he was the companion pet of the kid acrass that street, and was probably the biggest raccoon I’d ever seen, result of having never missed a meal in his whole raccoon life…