Pasadena Pistolera Protects Poor Pooch From Pesky Pest
In this morning’s links, Curbed LA pointed me to an article in today’s latimes.com covering an incident in Pasadena yesterday evening in which a resident decided to shoot a raccoon that attacked her dog. Apparently the woman first tried beating the thing with a long-handled garden tool of some sort but when that didn’t stop the onslaught, she… well, let’s just let PPD’s Lt. Bruce George explain it:
“So she goes and gets her gun and tries to shoot the raccoon, and it doesn’t do anything,” he said. “It still doesn’t stop. And then she whacked it a couple more times with the shovel, and then the raccoon died.”
As one of the many commenters to the article puts it quite succinctly: “…if you shoot one, and ‘it doesn’t do anything,’ then you have missed.”
The raccoon killer was not charged with a crime because the otherwise unlawful and repeated discharging of a firearm was deemed to have been an appropriate response by law enforcement. I’m basically OK with that. Seeing as how dangerous raccoons can be I do not fault the woman for coming to the defense of her dog.
But in the interest of showing that not all raccoons are crazed killers, I offer up the backyard encounter I had with one last summer as it climbed out of our neighbor’s loquat tree:
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Tease.
Either that or it was a very brief encounter.
No tease! It was a relatively lengthy encounter, couple minutes at least! Is the embed not working for you ataki? Agh, probably my fault.
Ah. Probably doesn’t like my Firefox on Mac. I’ll try looking with the Safari.
Fuckin’ raccoons. Just had to chase one off my porch last night, where it was harassing one of my cats.
Yup. I can sees it in Safari. Nifty!
I like the alliteration in your title! I’m okay with someone shooting a racoon that has attacked your pet. I’m not so okay with the town in Texas where it’s okay to shoot stray dogs.
Sigh no ‘coon lovin’ around these parts.
I have some unfortunate first-hand experience (well, I was there – I’ve never shot a raccoon personally) and I have to tell you, it is really hard to kill a raccoon. Multiple shots from two separate guns (one of them shot by someone who knew what he was doing) and the poor thing still had to be finished off with a shovel. So I can totally believe that a shot "didn’t do anything."
P.S. That video is adorable! I love raccoons when they are not attacking dogs (or chickens, for that matter).
This may not apply here, but it’s important to note that animals with rabies are next to impossible to kill as they are, for all intents and purposes, zombies. This American Life had a Halloween episode with a great bit about a raccoon gone bad:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1156
The thought of having the five raccoons we’ve tracked in our yard (they live in a nearby palm tree, of all places, and constantly fight high atop its crown) actually be zombie raccoons seriously makes me want to barricade myself in a Wal-Mart.