Burrito Justice

Another search of riveting garden video reveals our nocturnal friend in greater detail…

The arrogant little bastard took a dump right in front of the camera! You can see the steam rising up.

+1 to stucco-sux and noam for correctly guessing a racoon, and 1/2 a point to tk. (Sorry Steven, no sign that crappy raccoon has shitty kitty.)

Well, now I know what has been nosing around the grass in my yard – they’ve been known to roll up sod to get to the grubs underneath.  (For a while I thought I had gophers, and was relishing the thought of going all Bill Murray on them.)

So how does one discourage raccoons? They seem to be rather clever:

Only a few studies have been undertaken to determine the mental abilities of raccoons, most of them based on the animal’s sense of touch. In a study by the ethologist H. B. Davis in 1908, raccoons were able to open 11 of 13 complex locks in less than 10 tries and had no problems repeating the action when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down. Davis concluded that they understood the abstract principles of the locking mechanisms and that their learning speed was equivalent to that of rhesus macaques. Studies in 1963, 1973, 1975 and 1992 concentrated on raccoon memory and have shown that they can remember the solution to tasks for up to three years. In a study by B. Pohl in 1992, raccoons were able to instantly differentiate between identical and different symbols three years after the short initial learning phase. Stanislas Dehaene reports in his book The Number Sense that raccoons can distinguish boxes containing two or four grapes from those containing three.