NaturallyResilient

About

I have another raccoon story this week. The year we lived in north Austin, we had a cat door installed. We also had a huge cat feeder outside. This feeder would hold a 7 pound bag of feed easily as it was made of a eight inch PVC pipe about four foot long. The bottom end had 2 round holes cut in the side for the cats to slick their head to eat and it had a funnel mounted inside the pipe to funnel the food to the center. There was a floor on the inside to act as a dish. The feeder would only let food out when the food was low in the dish part. Between the free food and the cat door, we did end up collecting stray cats.
However what we did not expect to collect were raccoons.

Several mornings we woke to find the feeder on its side and totally empty. We would stand it up and fill it with another 7 pound bag of food and the next morning find it tipped over totally empty. We started watching to see what was eating all the food. We soon saw raccoons coming up to the feeder. What we thought was weird were that the cats lounging around outside were totally ignoring the raccoons. We would open the door and start barking and the raccoons would take off over the six foot privacy fence. It was only when the raccoons were on the move that the cats would suddenly notice that they were there.

Maybe they just did not want to notice them because if they did they would have to confront them and they did not want a fight, anyway the humans would refill the food dish.

Well, we humans did not have the money to feed all the wildlife in the area so we decided to move the feeder inside. The second night the feeder was inside, I had one of the cats (Callie) in the bedroom, petting on her when her nose when up and she started sniffing alertly. I told my husband something was in the living room. We stepped out and sure enough there were 3 raccoons headed for the cat food. We barked and chased them out. The two other cats lounging around the living room acted like they didn’t know the raccoons were there.

We thought we were through with the raccoons for the night. We went back to the bedroom with Callie and started petting her again. It wasn’t too long before her nose went up again. I told my husband they were back.

We ran back to the living room and chased the raccoons around a bit. They were not very timid creatures, but they finally headed back out the cat door. As the last raccoon was squeezing out, Callie ran up to it and batted it out the door. After that we had to lock the cat door closed at night and bring out a litter box. Luckily we did not stay in that house much longer; we moved and left the raccoons to fend for themselves.