There’s a raccoon in our shed, and unfortunately my son is quite fond of it.  It’s been there all summer and surprisingly it never had babies, so we think it’s a male.  He wanders in and out at night, exploring around the house and going wherever raccoons go.  He’s not afraid of us at all and once when I was sitting outside past dark, he walked right under my deck chair and around the house (which gave me quite the start, of course).  My 6 year-old son Kaden absolutely adores him, and will watch out his bedroom window before bedtime to watch Cooper “leave for his adventures”.  He asks me all the time where he goes, what he does, if I think he meets any other raccoons.  To him, this raccoon is a living story book, but to me, it’s just a pest that guards my shed and everything I’ve stored in there.  The only problem is he guards them FROM US.

We are remodeling our backyard, and unfortunately that means we need to tear down the shed and rebuild it because it’s just a shabby old thing (how do you think a raccoon got into it?)  In order to tear it down we need to move all of the stuff from inside of it, but of course the good ole’ raccoon in the shed isn’t about to just let us walk into his den.  If we try, we are met with growls very angry raccoon eyes; and I am not about to wait until its 10 pm and the raccoon is out on an “adventure” to try and move my things.  I would just block the hole he uses to get in if I didn’t think he would rip it off to get back inside.  And of course I don’t want to lock him inside to starve! Or at least I don’t think I do.

What I really need, is for someone to come and relocate the raccoon from the shed.  Preferably, without Kaden seeing or knowing anything about it, but I’d rather explain to him why Cooper had to go explore somewhere else than why Cooper got smashed inside of the old shed when it was torn down.  The sooner we can get rid of him, the sooner I can get a new shed and the happier I will be! This will be Cooper the Raccoon’s greatest adventure yet.