Tis the season for....raccoons

I have always had a fondness for raccoons.  I think it goes back to camping trips in the Redwoods with my family.  My little brother loved the raccoons we would see while camping.  He loved them so much that my dad made up a song for him.  (As a side note, my dad is totally awesome and created many songs for us.  He also has written a song for every one of his grandchildren.  Love you Dad!)  So my view of raccoons was very childlike.  I viewed them as these cute, cuddly, adorable, playful scamps.  Like this:

 

 

Ahhh, don't you just want to snuggle with it!

But over the past few years I have come to learn the truth about the "masked bandits."  These little buggers have been raiding our grape vines around this time every year.  In all honesty I wouldn't mind if a cute little raccoon family came into our backyard to have a grape picnic.  But I have two big problems with the nightly grape harvests.  Number one, the raccoons in Colorado are either way different than the California brand or I have not remembered them correctly.  Because the raccoons I see don't look like the cutie above, they look more like this:

I am pretty sure an encounter with this guy would result in a round of rabies shots. . .and maybe some therapy for post traumatic stress.  And even the scary breed of mutant killer Colorado raccoon would be fine with me if I didn't have three dogs (two of which are slightly larger than rats).

As you can guess, my little rat dogs and the proper sized dog all heard the invaders and wanted outside.  My groggy husband walked downstairs and let the dogs out without knowing that we had several visitors.  I must also mention that my rat dogs have no idea that they are small.  If a full blown cougar was in our backyard I have no doubt that Gidget and Bug would be snipping at its ankles.  These raccoons had at least 10 pounds on my min pins but like I said that is a moot point with those two.  A very loud animal brawl ensued and I ran down stairs certain something was eating my dogs (hoping Bug was the one being eaten, and don't judge if you haven't met her).  Kevin informed me that the coons had run off and we then spent the next ten minutes chasing and yelling at our dogs to get in the house.  Sheesh!  What a night!

So today we will be clipping down all our grapes to deter the raccoons from returning.  Maybe we should just cut the grape vines down.  Dogs aren't suppose to have grapes anyway (causes kidney failure in case you didn't know).  But the vines are so nice because they hide all the crap we store under the deck.  So grape snipping we will go because I don't want to walk out and see this one night:

We have a cat too!  Poor Coco wouldn't stand a chance

Or even more horrific this:

Real or photoshop??  I don't know and I am not sure which one would be more disturbing!