Critters

So a few nights ago, at 3:30 in the morning, we woke up to an intense scratching noise from within our wall. Kind of coming from beneath our house. Austin used the moment to emphasize that this is the reason that we can't let stray cats live under our crawl space. I was convinced. The cats needed to find a new home. But how does one go about getting rid of an animal? We didn't konw.

So who did we call?? Our local hunter and trapper, Ryan Lidholm.

Ryan came over that afternoon and set a trap for our cats.
Austin and I eagerly checked the trap all through the evening but found nothing. This morning, we woke up to a loud "meow-meow-meow..." We thought for sure we had trapped the culprit. Austin was going to take it to a different area and let it go. We thought we'd send it off with a full stomach so he went and got our 2 day old pot roast to feed it before the relocation.

As Austin approached the trap, a surprise awaited him. Look closely.
A raccoon!

What was confusing about this is that the meowing was coming from our crawl space still. We are thinking that the trapped raccoon outside the crawl space was freaking the cat out.

Anyway- for some reason, Austin decided to feed the raccoon the pot roast by dumping it on top of the cage. The coon wasn't too pleased about this. It kinda lashed out on us. Understandable. I can't think of many mammals that would appreciate being caged and then food dumped on us.

So at this moment, there is a trapped raccoon in my front yard, a very upset stray cat under our crawl space and a very stressed out dog (Sophie) in my house from all the critter noise coming from the front.

My gracious.

Stay tuned for more updates on our critter extermination.