The Fugitive

We had our raccoon trauma at the office. There were those among us that saw the raccoon as a harbinger of every kind of contagion known to man up to and including social diseases and malaria. I’m reasonably sure they understood that to get an STD from a raccoon that you first have to have sex with the raccoon, but I’m not sure. I was also not sure how malaria could be contracted from raccoon either.

There was also some mention on rabies, but Rocky wasn’t manifesting any symptoms. It wasn’t rabies that was drawing him to our door way, it was laziness and kibble. The cat food brigade became concerned when the panic merchants started making noise about “making calls” about Rocky. We don’t want Smokey to be the innocent victim of a raccoon pogrom. We needed to act first and fast.

One of Smokey’s Friends volunteers at a shelter and had access to live traps. We knew that any trapping was going to inevitably, trap cats and so we got in contact with the campus cat lady and she put us in contact with her feral cat contact and they told us we could take up to five cats to them this last weekend to be fixed – Yay, but we were trapping at the beginning of the week - Smokey’s Friends aren’t in the feral cat storage business. We couldn’t just tack them to a cork board, or stuff them into a drawer until Saturday and it’s not like we could set them loose with an appointment card and expect them to show up for a trip to the docs. Feral cats are notorious for not keeping appointments. We hoped we would catch Rocky first and not have to mess with the cats.

The first night we trapped a cat. A young, stupid cat who didn’t know better. The more experienced cats, possums, raccoons, voles, rats, and assorted whatnots knew better. They know there is no such thing as a free snack and they stayed away from the trap. Good thing too, we couldn’t have dealt with a mob scene. After an abstinence lecture and a film about self respect, we released the fertile little beast to the wild.

So. We set the trap again and hope for the beast. Nothing, I can’t say I wasn't relieved.

We were kind of going with the idea that the trap had served its purpose, and that the other little animals wouldn’t come around again, I mean look at what happened to the last guy who went into the box thing, I imagined that the little animals laughed and pointed at him and that others brought their children out to show them what happens to little animals who are too lazy to really work for their food – We didn’t even really want to set it again, but we did, with the caveat that if we didn’t catch anything this time we were going to declare Operation Enduring Vermin over.

I rolled in the next morning to find the trap full of dirt and a very cheesed off Rocky. I hadn’t planned on actually catching Rocky, and I didn’t know what to do with him next. After meeting him, my plan was to stay as far away from his surprising long, sharp teeth and claws as I could and wait for reinforcements. Raccoons are so cute when they aren’t caged and desperate,

We tried to Macgyver a way to get him water inside the trap. Everything we came up with were needlessly complicated and difficult to manufacture with the office supplies we had on hand and we didn’t take in to account how fast he would destroy what we did come up with – approximately 19 seconds after we gave it to him. We were more successful keeping him out of the sun if not the heat.

It turned out there was a plan for Rocky after all. At the end of the day he was loaded into a SUV and taken to his new home way, way, way out in the country… And not in the way Animal Control takes animals out to the “country” either. I pretty much expect him to be camped out in some barn eating horse chow by the midweek.