Why They Invented the Coonskin Cap

WHY THEY INVENTED THE COONSKIN CAP
By Dick Meister

I admit it. We had only ourselves to blame. When they first came to call we
welcomed them. Eagerly. Naively.

"Oh, aren't they cute," we said as they scratched imploringly on the glass
door leading to our deck, bright-eyed supplicants we couldn't resist. We
laid out plates heaped high with food. We took photos. We showed them off to
house guests.

We gave them clever names. "Rocky and the Rockettes," we called their merry
masked band.

Boy, were we stupid.

Yes, raccoons are cute, and quite photogenic. But raccoons are not nice. And
they are not stupid.

The tasty kibble we lavished on them wasn't enough. They repaid our largess
with dead-of-night forays into our garden to dig for the apparently even
tastier grubs that resided just beneath the topsoil.

It was not a pretty sight. Our furry former friends laid waste to whole
sections of greenery. Flowers died, roots were uprooted. Green turned to
brown.

We summoned a professional gardener. What to do? What to do?

"Shoot 'em," said he, a man from the countryside where that was an approved
method of pest control. Or if not that, "Poison 'em."

But killing would hardly do. We live in San Francisco, after all -- the city
of St. Francis, friend of all things feathered and furry, friend even of
marauding raccoons.

Trap 'em, said we. Just lure the little critters into cages, then whisk them
out of the city and let them loose, free to dig to their little hearts'
content in the wilds of suburbia.

That, too, called for a professional. For no little expense he put out the
cages. And sure enough, within a few days they were occupied by screeching,
very unhappy specimens of procyon lotor pacificus, if you'll pardon my Latin
-- ma raccoon, pa and a couple of the raccoon kids. They'd soon be gone for
good.

Gone they were -- to be replaced in a few months by a crew of hard-digging
look-alikes from the raccoon community, which obviously had gotten word of
the superb cuisine chez Meister.

Ah, but we'd been overlooking the advice of garden columnists. They said,
the lot of them, that keeping unwanted raccoons, deer or other four-footed
intruders away was simple. Just spray some hot chili oil on the ground or
sprinkle some hot chili pepper around.

Well, our raccoons -- perhaps being of Texas ancestry -- weren't dissuaded
one little bit by the whole bottle of chili oil and several large bags of
chili pepper we spread about. Hah, they ate more heartily than ever.

Ever more desperate, we turned to a device known as a Sensor Controlled
Animal Trainer, or SCAT, guaranteed to cause intruding animals to do just
that.

It's a sprinkler equipped with an infrared motion detector. As soon as an
animal crosses its path, whoosh! A spray of water blasts the intruder.

It worked, too -- for a while. But then came the morning when I found the
garden in its pre-SCAT state of raccoon disrepair and the SCAT device
covered with muddy raccoon paw prints. Must have malfunctioned, I thought,
taking up a broom to wave in front of the motion detector for a test.

Whoosh! I was hit by a burst of water that soaked me to the skin, knee to
foot. The sprinkler, which had been aimed in a direction completely opposite
me, had been turned around during the night... obviously by a masked
intruder.

Copyright © 2006 Dick Meister

Story ID:	1194
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Local History
Location:	San Francisco CA USA
Year:	2006