Raccoons Are From Hell

I love camping as you can tell from my previous post. I prefer to go on backpacking excursions rather than car camp here in Florida. The reason? Raccoons. Raccoons are smart. Backpackers don't carry much food, but campsites and picnic areas are a veritable smorgasbord of good eats.

If there is a campsite, there are raccoons. If there is a picnic area, there are raccoons. And these raccoons aren't your run-of-the-mill wildlife magazine raccoons. These are GIANTS and they sure as fuck aren't afraid of humans. Or small dogs as I found out last weekend. I think that human food (and y'all know that the food you take camping and picnicking ain't exactly healthy fare) has somehow genetically mutated them in to pissy, persistent creatures who are all about a Coke and some Pringles. Oh, and they just love dog food, too. Bastards.

The scariest part of all is the fact that they seem to have little or no fear of humans. I mean, we were 2 feet away and yelling and the huge fuckers just glanced over and went back to looking for food.

Since I have experienced these evil bastards before, we were prepared. All food was in the truck or in the cooler tied up with ropes to keep them out. The fact that there was not readily handy food did not deter them at all. They proceeded to rummage through ALL of the things we had left out-bug spray, paper cups, paper bowls, paper towels, all of it. We were trying to sleep while they were doing this. Now the dog, Crash, was just livid. Those damn things were just getting too close and they were messing with our stuff. She was fit to be tied. So the whole night we endured intermittent barking, growling, and rustling of miscellaneous items. Needless to say, there wasn't much sleeping.

Raccoons are evil.