Yard Bandit

We have a new little friend in our backyard....Backstory - I've been noticing over the past couple of weeks that our little cat, Mia, has really been eating her food quickly! I'll fill her bowl at night and then the next morning it's gone! I also started noticing that she refuses to go into our screened in porch and backyard lately choosing to instead lounge around in our carport, by the back door or on our cars. Hmmmm this tipped me off b/c she loves the backyard. Second thing that tipped me off was when the cat food bag had been clawed to shreds and the bag emptied!! A dog, I thought?? Or a neighborhood cat maybe? No no no....a trip outside one day revealed a RACOON on our porch! Tweedy and I tried several different things to get rid of it:

1. Set up the baby video monitor outside in front of a bowl of catfood. After waiting and waiting we finally saw the little booger on the screen chowing down. So Tweedy grabs his pellet gun and sneaks out the front door to shoot him, but he ran away right as the door opened. Not gonna be that easy.

2. Called Animal Control. Where I was told that in order for them to come rid us of the racoon, they would put a trap in our yard for a week, come check it and take away the animal once they caught it. This would cost us $200. No thank you!

3. Bought my own *#&% racoon trap for $50. The first couple of nights it didn't work. One night something even ate all the food, took a poop in the trap and somehow escaped with the door down. But then...BINGO! We caught not one, but TWO stinkers! The original plan was for Tweedy to shoot them once we caught them, but since he was unable to do that, he decided to let them go on his way to work in the "woods," which since we live in the city, consisted of a pack of trees somewhere downtown. But Problem Solved!!