Animal Trap Redux

After I caught the cat on Easter Sunday (see Meow? <*Hiss! Spit!*>), I didn’t have time to re-bait my cage trap and drop it in the crawl space. I set it out back under the eaves by the crawl space vent hole with the torn screen. It was left in the open position, but without bait.

K woke me up at 5:00 this morning, because something out back was making noise. A hit! I had another catch without even really trying, and this time it wasn’t a cat.



The beauty of catching a raccoon is that you don’t have to worry that it is someone’s cherished pet. Since the Humane Society didn’t open until 10:00 AM, I loaded Rocky’s cage in the trunk and headed to Oregon. He now has a new home where there is more space to roam and plenty to eat. It was far easier to get him out of the trap and into a nearby blackberry patch than I thought he would be.

Raccoons are smart critters (though not smart enough to avoid capture), so I am gambling that this one is not smart and motivated enough to travel five miles to a bridge, negotiate the bridge without being pancaked, and travel another three miles to locate the crawl space of his youth. Are raccoons good swimmers? This one would have to be. The Columbia is 500 to 2,000 yards wide, depending on where he tries to cross. Maybe I can successfully capture his entire family and transport them to a happy reunion in that blackberry patch.

Is it legal to transport raccoons across state lines?

Port Henry

Some of my earliest memories are of visits to Port Henry. We stayed in Dad’s parents’ two-story house south of the high school. The first picture is of that house. I remember that it had hardwood floors. The second-story floors had vents in them to allow heated air to circulate from the first story. I can remember “spying” on people downstairs through the vents. Also, the vent grates had holes just large enough to accommodate small marbles. My brothers and I had a great deal of fun scaring people downstairs by dropping marbles from the second story to the floor below. What brats we were!


The second picture is of a huge house owned by my Grandma L’s family. Dad’s Uncle S lived there. The picture shows that it has been greatly improved since the early 1960s. In my memory, it always appeared pretty run down and in need of paint. I always imagined that it was haunted, although I don’t think I ever shared my thoughts on that with anyone. I don’t think I ever went inside until after Uncle S died. We went with the adults, who were there to determine the fate of all the “treasures” inside. I remember ascending a wooden staircase and avoiding holes in some of the steps. I remember LOTS of cobwebs, and it seems like we startled a field mouse or two. Of course, that could all have been my overactive childhood imagination.

Picture three is a view south along the railroad tracks near the lake. That is St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in the distance on the hill. Port Henry was essentially a railroad town. It owed its prosperity to the work of transporting the iron ore from the mines in nearby Mineville. In the 1890s, Essex and Clinton Counties of New York produced 23% of the nation’s total iron output. Dad’s family made a living from the railroad. Mom’s father worked in a mine.


We enjoyed a nice walk on solidly-frozen Lake Champlain while we were at Port Henry. The last picture is one of a large number of ice-fishing shanties on the lake. By the way, if you want your very own ice-fishing shanty, there were a large number of them for sale by the state campground down by the lake.

If you enjoy milk, thank a dairy farmer

After we left M & J’s place, the first stop on our New York trip was cousin T’s dairy farm. Family dairy farms are much rarer now than they were when I was a kid, and on the New York side of Lake Champlain, they are almost all gone. Somehow, T, his wife B, and their three young boys hang in there. Even with a herd that fluctuates around the 150-head mark, he is considered a very small farmer.

T has to go over to Vermont for almost anything he needs for the farm. Dairy equipment and parts just are not available anywhere nearby.

If you are like us, the price you are paying for milk is half again as much as it was five or ten years ago. Don’t blame T or the other small farmers. None of that filters down to his level. Maybe it goes to the bigger operations. More likely, though, it goes into the pockets of the middlemen – big dairy processors like Dairylea in New York or Alpenrose in the Northwest.

By the way, if you have an extra litter of kittens, PLEASE do not dump them on dairy farmers. T and B have a problem here. The supply of cats is far greater than the demand. For some reason, though, everybody thinks dairies need them.

People have been watching too many movies and TV shows that show someone who is milking a cow aiming the teat and firing at the mouths of nearby cats. It’s as if the dairy farms (where, in the movies, everybody still milks by hand) have more milk than they properly know what to do with and are some sort of mecca for cats. Too much milk? Give it to the cats!
Not so. There is no such thing as too much milk at a dairy farm. Milk is money, money pays bills, and there are always more bills.

T and B’s orphan cats might be too numerous to count, even if you could get them in one place to count them. They’re not mousers. More likely, the rodents living on the farm are catters. B puts a little bit of cat food out for them each day, because her heart is too soft. However, it doesn’t even make a dent, and the cats that aren’t the fittest die. T wouldn’t be sad if they’d ALL die. They’re always under foot, and a cow with a turned ankle cannot go out to pasture. It might even mean one more vet bill.



T and B are happy running the farm. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t do it. They work sixteen hours a day in all kinds of weather and do not prosper. Cows need milking and care every day, even when you’re sick or your son is getting married in Kalamazoo. If you cannot do it, you have to hire someone who can (if you can find someone that capable and responsible for hire and can afford to pay them).

Ts and Bs are almost extinct. When the Ts and Bs are all gone, all the dairy farms will be big, sterile commercial mega-farms. The world, or at least this part of the world, will miss them.

Meow? <*HISS! SPIT!*>

Something tore a gaping hole through the screen on one of our crawl space vent holes. I’d have thought it was a possum, except that I haven’t seen a possum (not even of the common road kill variety) in our county in at least two years. My money was on raccoons. We’d had problems with them in the distant past, because we once had a neighbor who thought they were cute and fattened them up on cat food. We hadn’t seen raccoons for awhile either, but they’re great hiders and rarely pause in city streets to fight moving truck tires as the now-hopefully-extinct possums did.

Whatever had built this entrance to our crawl space was really beginning to agitate me. Off and on for several weeks, we heard horrible sounds emanating from underneath our laundry room – hisses, howls, bumps, and a sound that I imagined must be the sharpening of eyeteeth on drain pipes.

Time to act! We acquired a good solid wire box trap of the sort recommended by the Humane Society and various other PWCs (people who care). We added a dish of dry cat food, set the hook, and placed it down there where the varmint would find it.

It only took a couple of days. But it wasn’t a raccoon or a possum or my third guess (judging from the noise it made down there), a velociraptor.

My prey wasn’t happy inside my trap, despite the trap’s innate humaneness. I wasn’t happy with him either. Believe it or not, I am quite tolerant of and even friendly to well-behaved and well-controlled pets despite a vast array of dog bites collected while delivering newspapers in the days before leash laws. My catch hissed and snarled unceasingly in that trap. I’d rather have impaled it on a spear and displayed it in my front yard as a warning to all other feral creatures and their past or soon-to-be past owners. However, I have learned through a half-century of experience that even the most obnoxious members of sometimes-domestic species have a politically-correct army of human(e)s the size and ferocity of which I am ill-suited to handle on my own. Besides, my benevolent wife would not be pleased. So I did the right thing.

We gave up a portion of our Easter Sunday. We contacted every neighbor we could find to see if they were missing a cat or even recognized the one we “stumbled upon,” for the beast was not licensed or even collared. I knocked doors. K talked to various humans and machines on the phone. No takers. No leads. When we got home from church at 2:30 PM, there were no messages on our own phone-answering machine and no Post-It notes on our door from distraught mothers or fathers looking to reclaim “Fluffy” or “Tiger”.

My wife and I had agreed (thankfully!) that the creature could not spend the night. Nor could the creature be released within five miles of the house. If nobody would claim him, we did not want him awakening us at 2 AM again. I had a nice woodlot picked out in my mind, ten miles away from our house on the opposite side of a wide, deep, fast-flowing river, where there were plenty of rodents to feed on and plenty of coyotes in need of a meal. If the cat wanted to be wild, maybe it could be wild there.

Did you know the Humane Society’s Pet Lost & Found Department is open on Easter? I didn’t. I was going through the motions of dialing their number “just to be sure,” and a real person answered on the second ring. Try to get that level of customer service from your bank! I learned that they would accept my beast if I got him there by 5:00 PM. At four, I decided time was up. I loaded the cage in my trunk, now lined with an old tarp in case “Toby” got scared sh**less during the ride. Off to the shelter we went.

The volunteers there were very nice. I think they were all high-school girls, either working on their Senior Service hours or campaigning for a Teens Who Make a Difference Award of some kind. They walked me through the paperwork and took the varmint trap to the back room, where somebody who was hopefully dressed in thick leather from head to toe apparently extricated the animal. When one of the volunteers came out to give me the trap, I asked her what would happen to the cat. She replied that hopefully somebody would return to claim him, and if not, maybe somebody would adopt him. My interpretation: “The thing will be stone-cold dead in a week, but it won’t feel a thing.” Okay. That’s mean. I apologize. I didn’t particularly want the cat to die. I just didn’t want to hear it under my house again.

I got home at about five, and we went to a friend’s house for Easter dinner. We didn’t get home until late. However, the phone-answering machine was there, and it did its job, much to my chagrin. The little red light blinked on and off. When I pushed the little button, the machine spewed forth its message, recorded at 7:55 PM. “K, I hope I am not too late. This is Connie Ferguson over on Tremont Street. I think you found my cat….”

K talked to her this morning. “My cat would never have gone under your house on his own. Something must have scared him to make him go under there. He wasn’t licensed yet, but I intended to do it this week – really! He had a collar; it must have gotten snagged on something and broken off.” It really did sound to K like Connie was going over to the Humane Society’s animal jail to bail the fur ball out. I hope he never comes back here. Now that I know he’s Connie’s “kid,” there’s no way to dispatch him without seeing that humane army storm across my front lawn in battle array.

I’m looking for suggestions just in case!

Back alive

We just spent a week in upstate NY! A great week it was too. GEL-oh, sorry to have missed you on Sunday. I hope you are feeling better.

Too much happened to fit into one entry. Besides, we don't have our own pics yet. Let's start with this borrowed photo of Kristof Ongenaet dunking on Lazar Hayward of Marquette during the Saturday 'Cuse game that I attended with LUD. Syracuse won, 87-72, in its last good moment of the 2007-2008 season. After today's blowout loss to Villanova, the season is over (unless you count the post-season NIT, which nobody from a real conference does). Maybe we'll be better next year with a somewhat more experienced team and, hopefully, a more injury-free one.