Excuse Me

    A raccoon has recently decided to use the hayloft in my horse barn for a potty. This is called a "raccoon latrine." I Googled raccoon latrine and got 17,900 hits in 0.15 seconds. This is obviously a much bigger problem than I realized.
    I chose to follow the advice of a county public health site on the web. "We are the government. We are here to help." Right?
    I followed their instructions to the letter and cleaned up my latrine exactly as they advised. I had to wear protective gear and take multiple precautions as some raccoon feces may carry a deadly parasite.
    Following all this effort the obvious next step was to place something in the hayloft that would prevent the raccoon from returning. The government recommends either mothballs or coyote urine. Wouldn't you know it?  I was completely out of coyote urine! So it would have to be mothballs.
     I spent quite a lot of time placing mothballs all over the hayloft. This is not as easy as it might seem. My hayloft is not tall enough to allow an adult to stand upright. And the only 4 ft tall child I know was busy Sunday. So I stooped over for hours on this job.
    The theory is that the mothballs smell so bad (true) that the raccoon would not return (false.)
    After all my hard work I wanted to see how things were going.  I parked my car outside of the barn and was greeted by the overwhelming odor of mothballs baking in the warm spring air. Confident that this unnatural scent would repel any wild animal I climbed up to the hayloft. There, before my eyes, were at least six little raccoon piles. All of them deposited within inches of my carefully applied mothballs.
    I resolved that none of this would be in vain. I would get a photo! So I set up my trusty deer-cam and got the little guy's picture on the second try.