Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Raccoon Hunting

We live in the country now and part of the deal you get on the outskirts of town include mice, bugs, and other critters that frequent the great outdoors...no big deal really, until a raccoon tries to get into your back door.

We did have one other raccoon encounter at our house...I was gone at the time, but lucky for us our next door neighbors are gun-toting officers of the law, and they had a pretty good time shooting a raccoon that had gone up a tree in between our house and the neighbor's house.

So yesterday around 4:00ish Steph calls all out of breath, "a raccoon was scratching at our bedroom screen door trying to get in!" She thought is was a cat at first, then realized that it's a cat you don't want to pet. She closed the sliding glass door and the 'coon just sat on our deck for a while and then went back by our dog kennel and they were going nuts barking and scratching at it.

So when I got home I got out the .12 gauge, and let the dogs out and it was still there all frightened and hidden under some stuff that is in between our garage and our neighbor's garage...Annie actually pointed it right away, I called them off and got them both back in the kennel and proceeded to throw stuff at the raccoon until it climbed up on some stuff where I could get a good shot at it.

The problem was if I shot it where it was at that point I would have blown a hole in my garage, so I sent Steph in to get the Red Ryder BB gun. I shot it about 4 times with that to make it uncomfortable and just tick it off enough for it to move into a different position. That worked perfect and I blew it's face off from about 10 feet away.

The boys of course wanted to see it so I scooped it up with a shovel and laid it on the road...they gawked for a while and then we threw it across a field in a ditch. As Maxim would say, "Good times, Dad, good times."

1 comment:

sal said...

You should have seen knock the snot out of the possom that had moved into our yard and drove Cady nuts!!! She was convinced it lived under the little shed in the backyard and would do this yard dance, checking the primeter every chance she got. Untill one night we had had enough of the snarling little possom. Brad fetched his best baseball bat and swung away!! Lets just say the adrenaline was pumping and Cady is a much happier pup!!