Never a Dull Moment!

Last year my niece Jill's husband Jim trapped 2 raccoons in my mother-in-law's attic.
The first one was a BIG raccoon and the other medium sized.
The guy who took charge of the raccoons disposed of them even though he said he would return them to the wild. This was upsetting enough.
This time it was a female raccoon who had just had a litter.
During the night, Muriel was woken up by a big crashing sound in the kitchen. When she investigated she found that the folding ladder leading to the attic had been pushed down, knocking down a bunch of stuff off the shelves in her pantry. She was also wondering if her water line was broken and so she called us. Bruce went to her house to check things out and turn off the water.
In the morning the service guys showed up and told her there were raccoon prints down there.
Their first thought was that it must a pretty big raccoon to have pushed down the ladder and the size of the paw prints confirmed it.
Bruce bought traps and laid them out with Jim that afternoon.
Bruce went into the attic and found the nest, right above the ladder's steps, on the right, deep into a crawl space, full of insulation. He heard the baby raccoon noises and wondered how they would get the animal out without a fight.
The traps didn't work. The mother raccoon figured out a way to get to the opened cat food can left in the cage as bait without setting off the trap. She reached inside through the bars of the cage without triggering the trap release... Smart girl she was...
But this brought another problem. if she was smart enough to do that, there was a chance she would not get caught at all and she had already done enough damage.
Bruce called the DNR and was given the number of a professional wild life trapper.
He came and set a trap to kill the poor animal.
When Bruce told me this I got so upset I cried.
He figured she would not leave her nest until night time. I tried to talk him into finding another way but he didn't know what else they could do and he said the trapper would have killed her anyway, even after catching her alive. And her babies were going to suffer the same fate.
Muriel called again to say she had heard a noise in the attic and Bruce figured the trap had worked. It had... not as well as planned but by the time they got to her she was dead.
Jonathan crawled into the small space where the nest was looking for the babies and found three.
She had moved them further in and he's not completely sure he found them all.
He put them in a cardboard box and covered them up to keep them warm and brought them home.
These babies still have their eyes closed... They wriggled when he took them out of the box to make the inside more comfortable for them. Once was even making suckling noises... poor little orphans... What were we going to do with them? We didn't know how much of what to feed them? We had bought cat milk last year but had long since gotten rid of the box... We were out of our league, besides the fact that it is illegal to keep raccoons without a proper license...
So I did a search online and found a shelter in Indianapolis. My first concern was their immediate care and then figuring out how to get the kittens to the shelter.
At first the lady was very upset because she thought we had killed the mother needlessly. We did what the DNR told us to do, which redirected her anger towards the DNR as there should have been another way to retrieve the mother and her babies so they would have all survived.
She gave us instructions on how to take care of the kittens until morning: keep them very warm in a box, in a quiet, dark place; feed them warm sugar water if we didn't have cat's milk; rub their genitals to encourage them to void, like you do with baby rabbits; not let the house pets smell them in any way and the less handling the better.
Jon brought down his lizards' red light and secured the box in a corner where no pets could get to and gave the kittens time to settle down before feeding them.
Bruce had a pet raccoon when he was growing up. I don't know if the laws were the same but they found this baby raccoon who adopted them and the family has many funny stories about Zorro.
Zorro is a legend in the Brindle household. He hated cigarettes and would wait until Dick (my father-in-law) was asleep and then pull the package out of his shirt pocket and shredded them to bits then gave Dick a ring of hickies around his neck!
They found him in the freezer one day, sitting there, eating chocolate chips out of a box Muriel had put them in... he had a cage but knew how to open it and he did manage to destroy the attic when he made his way up there and ran from one side to the other.
Zorro's story ended in a sad way too and maybe that's why some in the family had thoughts of keeping these babies.
We will meet Sue north of Indy tomorrow morning... actually in a few hours as it is already almost 2am. This center, the Four Maples Wildlife Rehab Center, located in Pittsboro, IN, specializes in rescuing raccoons. I feel good about taking them there.
We have a responsibility to ensure their survival in part because we caused them to lose their mother. I hope they will make it.
Something good can come from all this...