We Went To Austria For 3 Weeks

NOTE: We returned last Tuesday night-Wednesday midnight. It's been a week since I wrote most of this. and we have the yard looking much better. The garden looks more like a garden than before we left! Still a couple more heavy weeding sessions and many more seedlings to transplant into the ground but things are looking really good.


We entered the house and immediately noticed how smelly it was. It had been shut up for 3 weeks. Then we started turning on the lights and noticed what a mess was in the kitchen and front room. Flour, sugar, other food stuff knocked down, nibbled, moved around and in one spot --- broken glass.

I was all set to blame the Cookie Monster.  My Schatzi questioned my sanity but, consider the evidence --- it went after the sugar, flour and butter in the kitchen AND an Austrian decorative, wrapped cookie in the front room was the only thing that was completely eaten. It took about 2 hours to clean up after we got home at 12:30 AM. We had been awake for 24 hours (neither of us was able to sleep on our flights).

Ok, realistically, maybe a fox. But, no, it's actually a raccoon and boy-howdy is my Schatzi pissed, now that we saw and chased it last night (for the second time)!  It went after his precious rye bread (as good as from home but made for him weekly by a baker friend here). The cats are none too pleased either, it ate all their food. And I'm miffed it took(!) the biggest volunteer curcubit in our compost bin and dirtied up my newly mopped floors.  We were up several times through last night chasing sounds.  I finally startled it in the kitchen & T went after it with our only good broom. Yes, it broke. No, he did not kill the raccoon, those suckers are huge.

Oh and the night before? We had a skunk spray outside one of our bedroom windows.  Really.  They were wide opened.  We were sound asleep. I'm pooped and want to go back to Austria, watch European Cup soccer, eat too many deserts, drink good wines, hike mountains and wait for the Euro to collapse.  (Ok, maybe not the last one.)
Anyway, Nature -- we live in it.  Anyone know how to encourage raccoons "respect boundaries" without a .22?


UPDATE: The raccoon -- we get nightly visits. Schatzi stayed up one night for 3 hours waiting to kill it in the most benign way we could think in -- a hard whack to quickly (hopefully) break its neck as it comes through the cat door. That night it never showed up until 3AM. We were asleep, the cat door was blocked up and the cats were inside. They really don't like it, they've never been closed up their whole lives. It's all so awful. Last night, I tried to lay in waiting but it got spooked and got no further than poking its nose into the cat door. This is all really awful.

Why we aren't using a Have-a-Heart trap.
All we would be doing is moving him/her to become someone else's problem. Even the largest national forest many miles from here has people living in and near it. Raccons carry rabies. That's not fair to other people.

Someone suggested if we were squeamish about killing it ourselves we could drown it in the cage. That horrified both of us!!! Even now, the thought of it makes me shudder.

Shooting it require more skill than we have and we aren't going to ask a friend to do that. Raccoons die hard. even shot it takes then a while to die (and suffer).

Our hope is that whichever of us does it strikes hard enough to break its neck with one blow. Quickly. It's still awful. Thinking about it all makes me sad.