100 Raccoons – The Weird Side of the Internet

100 Raccoons – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Imagine feeding the pigeons, and hundreds of them show up, start climbing on you, pecking at you, tuck bibs into their neck feathers and pull out plastic silverware they found in a fast food parking lot? Yeah, maybe you shouldn’t feed the pigeons. Not the fancy stuff, anyway. Be the dirty secret food that’s in the fridge at 3am. Be the shredded mozzarella of the pigeon world.

But someone should’ve told a woman in the state of Washington to put the Fancy Feast away when she was feeding the raccoons in her backyard. First she did a little but the little wouldn’t do it and… you get it. So she shows up home one day and there’s fifty to a hundred hungry raccoons in her yard, scratching her door, her car, following her everywhere, by which we’re talking the car to the house to the car.

Who the hell feeds raccoons? They’re trash pandas. You want them to eat, leave your garbage can lid ajar and look the other way. They’re not opossums; they have diseases. They can get rabies. And if I say a hundred aggressive raccoons in my yard, I’d get the rabies shots ahead of time.

There are laws not to feed bears and mountain lion, but no laws about feeding small wildlife, it being well understood that you don’t feed pests.

Briget Mire, spokesperson for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, wrote, “The raccoons appear to have started dispersing now that they are no longer being fed, and we are glad for a positive outcome to this case.”

Once she stopped feeding them, they went away. This is the body of the article, “Here’s what to do if 100 aggressive raccoons won’t leave you alone!”

I love life hacks. I wonder what they’ll say about petting stray dogs in alleyways?

More from Liam Sweeny…