On the previous discussion about raccoons, my experience is that sometime during the regular growing season, raccoons would show up in my backyard, and for some reason knock over or move a lot of my potted plants. They had to be adults because I would sometimes find big, heavy 5-gallon or 7-gallon pots moved or knocked over. (I don’t know what the conversion to metric system is for plant pot sizes!) They always show up after it’s fully dark, and it did not seem to matter if the nighttime irrigation sprayers turned on or not. I would dutifully put upright all the knocked over pots the next morning. But one summer, it seems one particularly vicious raccoon moved in and it would knock over the same pots I had uprighted that morning, plus additional ones. He would also bite holes in my drip sprayer lines. I guess when they would turn on in the middle of the night, he would get mad at them. Then he started tipping the pots upside down such that the plants would sometimes get knocked out of their pots. A couple of times I didn’t catch them until the roots had been fried by the sun. And then he started to dig out the occasional plant right out of its pot. I don’t know why, but my collection would not survive his efforts if they kept up. So I started with all the various stinky smelly kinds of things, getting some from local nurseries, moving on to online sources for recommended “surefire” solutions. None of them deterred this guy. So I next went to sonic (and a few included strobe lights, but that didn’t bother this guy at all) methods. I never knew how “loud” these were because of course I couldn’t hear them. I finally got one that produced several supersonic bands of frequencies. Even though I couldn’t hear any of them, I learned that it was doing what was advertised because the lowest frequency was at the top of the human hearing range. When I triggered its motion detecting system after setting it up, all of a sudden I heard my two teenage kids yelling from inside the house to turn off whatever I’d turned on. (I couldn’t hear anything.) One daughter came running outside and yelled at me how awful the sound was. She said it was incredibly loud and incredibly obnoxious. This seemed like a good sign. The next morning I found an amazing number of pots turned over and trashed. I guess it annoyed the raccoon so much that he got mad and did an even worse job of destroying things than usual. But it didn’t deter him at all. I started reading up on what people did when none of these solutions worked. There was of course the trapping method, but the city and the county said they didn’t support that kind of thing. They said I should learn how to coexist with the raccoons. But coexisting would mean giving up on my plant hobby. Then I came upon a few suggesting setting up an electric fence. I know these work well because I saw them in use around campgrounds in Kruger National Park in South Africa, and then one year quite a while ago we had this puppy grow up to be a much huger dog than we anticipated. He was a very good dog, but he would not stay out of our vegetable garden and he would squash everything. The local pet store had various electric methods to “teach” dogs where they could or could not go. Most involved collars and buried wires, but there was a simple electric fence being sold too. It was very easy to set up, and it worked so well that our dog would not go anywhere near any bare wire after that. I got shocked a couple of times and could see why he feared it so much. Eventually I didn’t even have to turn it on. So I decided it was time to do that to this raccoon. I put the transformer on a timer so it would only come on in the middle of the night when we were asleep. I didn’t have to enclose anything; I just had to stretch a few wires in key locations where it would be impossible for the raccoon not to brush up against a wire in order to access the pots he loved to knock over. (Also, putting it on a timer meant I didn’t get accidentally shocked during the day.) That first night I had it working, I was awakened by some loud animal screaming and crashing noises as it rapidly left our backyard. The next night, it happened again. And then maybe 3 days later it happened one more time. After that I have never had any pots tipped over. It turns out they’re not active in this area during the winter time, so now I turn it off in the winter and wait for the first time I find a few pots tipped over. After turning it back on, the problem vanishes. One of our outdoor cats who apparently roams at night will get spooked about the backyard when I first turn it on. But then he adapts and isn’t bothered by it for the rest of the summer. For anyone interested, all you need to purchase is the transformer unit that provides the high voltage (but low current) shocking pulses (I think it’s about 1 pulse per second; they come in various electrical sizes depending on how large the animals are or how long your fence is), a roll of bare aluminum wire (or there is also a bright yellow cord with a bare wire embedded in it), one or more grounding rods (a 50 to 70 cm small diameter metal rod made of something like stainless steel that won’t corrode in soil), a sufficient length of insulated wire to go from where the transformer unit is located to the grounding rod(s), and insulated or stiff plastic stakes that are of the height you want the wire to be above the ground. (I place the wire low enough that the raccoon can’t go under it, but high enough that he can’t jump over it.) It’s easy to find the grounding stake and insulated wire at any hardware store or Home Depot or Lowes. It’s much easier to just go online (Amazon or eBay for example) and order the transformer unit, roll of bare wire, and especially the hard plastic stakes made especially for setting up a simple home “fence”. (It’s not really a fence, it’s a wire suspended above the ground.) These stakes are about 2-3 ft/60-100 cm tall and have clip-like appendages every few inches/cms along the stake where you can attach the wire (or wires) at the height(s) you desire. For me this works perfectly, and I don’t have to poison or kill or trap the animal, or annoy my kids with obnoxious loud sounds, and it doesn’t really hurt the animal either. And my plants thank me for it too. --Lee Poulsen Pasadena, California, USA - USDA Zone 10a Latitude 34°N, Altitude 1150 ft/350 m > On Jul 12, 2020, at 1:34 PM, Tim Eck via pbs <pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote: > > Yes, he'll be back along with those long-legged rats, the white tail deer. > The deer do more damage but the raccoons can get into more different > things. > _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/…