Raccoons and Cats

NOTE: This was originally going to be a couple of lines in response to Paula's "No Name Kitty" post over on her blog.  But as with many things in my life, it kinda got out of hand...

We have a variety of feral cats roaming around, most of whom have some sort of name, mostly because The Beneficiary thinks they're hers. I've told her that even the housecats we've raised and "owned" were never really ours -- they're cats -- never mind these outlaws, but she pays no attention to me and names them anyway. 

We spend a fair amount putting out cat food and whatnot, and a few of the ferals think we're the shit and will hang out with us just like a pet. Mostly they just ignore us and keep their distance, although they hang around. 

The nice thing about them is that when you have cats, you haven't got anything else, and in Texas that means you don't have snakes, tarantulas, mice, rats, and other annoyances. This is particularly true in an area like ours in which we back onto an open field with a wooded creek a few hundred yards away which all the local wildlife use as a highway from one side of the County to the other. They leave the turtles alone because even though the kittens think they're entertaining, they figure out pretty shortly that turtles are really hard to eat. As a result, it's not uncommon to find small turtles communally sharing the cat food with the ferals when they're not being batted around like hockey pucks by the kittens.

We haven't any idea how many ferals we have -- or more accurately that the neighborhood has -- because they're "outside" cats, which means lots of stuff happens to them ranging from just going walkabout and finding better food and/or women to unfortunate traffic incidents to a pretty high-density coyote population who think cats taste like chicken and hawks who think kittens look just like little bunnies. It's just life, but as a result, the ferals come, go, appear, disappear -- the number usually hovers around six, but has been as few as two and as many as ten.

Mostly I ignore the wild kingdom outside my back door -- drama, fights, births, deaths -- as it's none of my business. The Beneficiary pays more attention to them, but for my money as long as they're doing what I pay them to do (i.e., kill stuff I don't like in the surrounding area) the rest of their lives are their problem.  They keep the place cleaned up, and I give them otherwise unavailable Mixed Grill Pate and keep the neighborhood dogs off them, and other than that, they're on their own.

But raccoons are different.

Raccoons, it turns out, aren't the cute little masked bandits that Disney would have you believe. They are mean, fast, vicious, predatory, and when they can find a pile of kittens or some such, live meat-eaters. I have more than once glanced out into the back after dark and seen all the ferals sitting up on fence-rails surrounding their feeding area being pretty disgusted at the raccoon who's below them eating their food. 

Most of the cats have better sense than to tangle with raccoons as a result of bitter and hard-learned personal encounters. But they also know that I'll kill a raccoon every single time I can get a bead on one, so they spend their time splitting attention between the vicious little furball and the back door, waiting for me to appear with a rifle.

The raccoons know it, too, and at the first rattle of the doorknob will take off in a Warner Brothers Cartoon-like grey streak across the lawn into the dark. Even if I'm fast and lucky, I've only got about a 50/50 shot at sending him on to his next iteration on the wheel of life, but even with those low odds, I still manage to keep them pretty thinned out.

One of our (many years) old ferals is a gigantic long-haired tabby-styled cat named "Juice." The back yard is his turf, and he rules it, and he rules it with an iron -- ahhh --- paw, and defends it against all comers; there's always a new young male turning up who decides to give him a run for his money. Juice has been the top tier for years. He radiates distain for humans and usually won't let us anywhere around him. The very few times he has, we've found that he is basically an extremely heavy, dense, cat-shaped wad of muscle and scar tissue. He's the cat-world equivalent of a mix between alpha wolf and a working pit bull. 

Juice is one of the few cats who will take on a raccoon -- and I wish he wouldn't. Leaving aside the fact that they're always his size or better and he gets his ass kicked every time, those friggin' things also tend toward rabies, although not as much as the skunks who turn up now and again.

There's one industrial-sized raccoon in particular that comes around -- he's roughly the size of a Cooper Mini -- who got to be that size by outthinking, outfighting, and outrunning dogs, cats, and people with guns all these years. Our back yard and field is practically a survival of the fittest lab. Juice, the giganto-cat, tied into this thing a couple of weeks ago. Juice turned up the next day with a ripped ear, swollen face (one eye swollen shut in particular), and patches of fur and skin ripped clear down to the meat on his throat and one of his rear legs. He was hobbling around pretty slow, dragging a leg and leaking, and then he disappeared for several days. I figured he was done for, which I was sorry to see because I actually liked the tough old bastard.

But in the last few days, he's reappeared, re-established his dominance (none will challenge him when he decides he's going to eat -- they just back slowly away with their tails and heads down and fur standing up all over them...) and appears to be back in play. He's moving a little slower and, not surprisingly, is In A Mood, which means none of the other ferals will challenge him even momentarily in that pro-forma way cats have because he skips the preliminaries and goes directly to knocking the crap out of them if they get out of line. 

So, it looks like he's going to continue his career. Glad to see it. 

The problem is that if he tries that raccoon again, the raccoon will kill him. There's no doubt. Whatever miracle saved him last time out won't work this time with the beating he's already taken. So, even though I normally only intervene on a happenstance schedule, I've now set up a firing point with the ranges dialed in on my rifle, and check the area periodically.  Sooner or later El Mapache Grande will return -- and when he does, I'll drop him like a sack of wheat. Via con Dios, ya furry land-pirhana. Maybe Juice will get another couple of years of ruling the kingdom, if he stays out of traffic...

Post Script: It occurs to me that I haven't seen the raccoon since that night. It is unlikely in the extreme that Juice killed him -- killing one of those things generally takes a dog (a BIG dog), coyote, or rifle to accomplish -- but maybe Juice isn't the only one who took a beating. Raccoons, whatever their other failings, are pretty smart. Maybe he took enough of an ass-beating that running it through whatever passes as raccoon-calculus, he's decided that coming back for whatever's in the food bowls just isn't worth the trouble.  Hmmm.  We'll see.

In Our Next Episode: I explain in great detail where the hell I've been for the last couple of months. Salacious stories and naked pictures may be involved.  Or not.