When Raccoons Go Bad By Dr. John Jones

                                                                                            
              

        

             We've  been invaded by wildlife again! Not bats this time, though, but raccoons. Fortunately, this didn't occur in our house, but in my home away from home- the barn.

             There have been visitations in the past, after all, a woods sits forty feet from the backside of the barn. Raccoons have come in for an occasional meal of cat food, and possibly a romp in the haymow, but they haven’t taken up residence or done any real damage. That is, until now.

            I first suspected we had a guest when for several mornings in a row the cat food bowls were empty and flung to the ground from their perch on a ledge beside a ram stall. The telltale sign, however, was the water bowl, nearly drained except for a scant amount of mud left over from the raccoon’s habit of washing his little paws and moistening the food. Of course, the extra cleanup duty was annoying, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. The dragged-on winter, I’m sure, was literally hitting him where he lived, too, out in the woods.

            So I put up with the varmint until one morning I discovered he had crossed the line of decency, even for a raccoon.  That’s when things got personal.

            Dianne, our newest barn cat, had been missing for 36 hours, when I found her hunkered down at the back of one of those ram pens. Calico in color, but not personality, she is probably the sweetest cat we’ve ever had, and considered many times to be a housecat candidate. A quick physical revealed no lesions until I got back to her rump, squishy to the touch and oozing a fetid, brown fluid. It was a bite abscess, several bites actually. Who would have done this? She had no enemies amongst the other barn cats.

            Later that same day, after Dianne had been taken to our hospital to have her wounds attended, I found Clark, another barn cat, in the mulch beneath our kitchen window. He had wounds on his neck, not as severe as Dianne’s, but bad enough to follow her to DAH.

            As a serious rodentophobe, my cats are important to my barn life, not just as companions, but as bodyguards as well. This perpetrator had to be stopped. Thus, my introduction to using a live trap, where my new found skills, and some honey ham, yielded not one, but two raccoons. 

The nuisance factor notwithstanding, readers should know that raccoons can carry many serious diseases. Among these is canine distemper virus, which is not good news for dogs. Moreover, although raccoons in this area are not known to harbor rabies, there is always the potential, and that isn’t good for anybody. Two bacterial diseases, leptospirosis and salmonella, can be spread in their urine and feces, respectively, and I can attest, when a coon is caught in a live trap there is an abundance of each released.

            On that note, perhaps the greatest threat posed to humans is through a parasite they carry, Baylisascaris procyonis, a member of the roundworm family. If the eggs of this parasite are inhaled or ingested, the larvae released can create a condition known as visceral, ocular, or neural larval migrans, depending on where they locate. When our body detects an aberrant larva migrating through it, an immune inflammatory response is initiated which can result in the formation of cysts. Some of these can be quite large, and mimic the effects of a tumor. And depending on the location, they can be difficult to treat, even fatal.

            As for the two raccoons, they were dealt with humanely, but, regrettably, justice was delivered. When raccoons become a menace, second chances aren’t an option. If I had let them loose in the woods, they would have just come back to the barn or gone to the neighbors. Obviously, they had no respect for the cats, nor fear of me or the trap.

            Clark was able to return home two days after the second coon was trapped, and the barn deemed safe. Dianne’s wounds required more extensive treatment, including daily lavage. She wasn’t real keen on that, I have to say, but she did take a liking to overall office life, and made a lot of new human friends. She’s actually still there as I write this, five weeks after the incident. And if she plays her cards right, Dianne may get that housecat promotion, yet!