The Raccoon Odyssey

Entry, Foot in Mouth
Rachel Turner, NCSU

I spent two summers in high school volunteering at a wildlife center, a busy facility made up of a few run-down portables and some flight aviaries and duck ponds.  Our mission was to take in and treat injured wildlife, from nestling songbirds that had clumsily fallen out of their nests to abandoned coyote pups. I worked with a lot of raccoons while I was there, from blind infants who could only squirm and suckle to huge adult males who wanted nothing more from life than the chance to rip off my hand.  However, nothing prepared me for the small female that I encountered on a hot day in late July.  My supervisor Ashley and I were doing the evening rounds, giving all the animals their delicious dinner of watermelon, apples, and dead frozen mice.  We ventured out into the late-afternoon heat to take care of the animals out in Building C, a crummy and musty portable where we kept large birds and other special cases.  At first glance, this particular raccoon was just another scared animal, crouched at the back of her crate, watching us switch out her old food dish.  When I reached in to pull out her bedding towel, which was crusted with feces and dried urine, she shifted a bit to the side and exposed the side of her back leg, which was when I noticed her wound.  She had somehow acquired a large, gaping cut on her haunch, and as soon as Ashley saw it she sent me to get the staple gun.  However, this little raccoon turned out to be a lot more than we had bargained for. 

Our traditional strategy for getting a raccoon out of a crate was pretty simple.  We would toss a towel over its head and then reach in while wearing leather gloves and grab the raccoon by the scruff, but this particular female was having none of that.  She avoided the towel like the plague, and reared up hissing and snapping at our hands.  When we tossed it her way, she lunged at it and attacked, trying her very best to shred it into ribbons of terrycloth.  She bared her needle-teeth, daring us to get closer.  I was sent to fetch a catchpole, a large metal pole with a loop at the end usually reserved for catching dangerous animals in large spaces, not small raccoons confined in boxes, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  After several attempts and a lot of cursing, we managed to get the loop around the raccoon and pull her out of her crate and onto the counter.  I threw a towel over her body and pinned her down, while Ashley prepared the staples.  We knew that the little girl would fuss when we put the staples in, so I braced myself and tightened my grip. 

The first staple snapped into place with little trouble, but the second one caused a veritable explosion.  In a whirl of acrobatics and strength that could have only resulted from adrenalin, the raccoon twisted out of my hands, tore out both the staples, and ran to the far corner of the room, where she sat defiantly leering up at us, panting and hissing, blood oozing from her haunch.  What ensued was nothing short of a wild-goose chase, the raccoon scampering around the room while we tried to pin her down, leaving vivid, scarlet smudges of blood everywhere she went.  We might as well have been kids at a fair trying to catch a greased pig for all the good our efforts did.  I was sent inside again, this time to get tranquilizer. 

When I returned to the room, Ashley had managed to pin the animal down, and we quickly injected her squirming body with the tranquilizer and then let her go.  She scrambled to the nearest corner and tried in vain to jump on top of a box, getting weaker and weaker as the seconds wore on.  However, she was not going to go down that easily.  She fought the tranquilizer for ten agonizingly long minutes, but eventually her legs became too heavy, and she flopped down on the floor.  I scooped up her little body and covered her with a towel, again pinning her down to the counter.  Ashley administered the staples and we returned her to her crate to sleep off the tranquilizer. 

The room looked like a small-scale war had been fought in it, and Ashley and I resembled the victims of a large, furry tornado, but we had successfully treated the little beast.  I just pity the volunteers that had to feed her breakfast.  She was going to wake up a grumpy girl with one pounder of a headache.