War has been Declared but I seem to be on the Losing Side

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Every year. Every. Single. Year. I hate raccoons. I really do. If you are one of those people who think raccoons are adorable, harmless animals, try keeping chickens for a while. Raccoons are evil. They don’t just kill for food, they seem to kill for fun. Over the years, I have lost track of how many chickens I have lost to the back-yard thugs. I’ve given up on ducks. Ducklings are more expensive than chickens and even easier prey for the masked hooligans. I’ve lost 9 of those to the little bandits. Three adults who all died of broken necks and six ducklings that were all ruthlessly murdered in one night. Finding six baby corpses is not an enjoyable way to start a new day. This spring it has begun again. I began the winter with thirteen chickens. Four roosters gave up their lives to feed the family (they were starting to annoy the neighbours). Of the eight hens, I am now down to three and those remaining three are being ruthlessly stalked every night. The past three nights I have diligently baited and set the live-trap (inside the fenced in, meshed-over chicken pen. I don’t mind raccoons that wander the neighbourhood if they stay away from my chickens). The first morning, the bait was gone, the trap was sprung, flipped and dragged a good five feet from where I had set it. I suspect that I caught the perpetrator who managed to be agitated enough to flip the trap over allowing him (or her) to wiggle free. The second night, I baited the trap with cat food and reset it thinking maybe it was a fluke that the raccoon was able to escape. On the second morning, the trap was shifted a few inches to the side, it was not sprung but the bait was gone. Naturally, kitty kibble falls through the spaces in the trap and my clever little nemesis was able to snack on the intended bait after he moved the trap out of the way. Last night I decided to up the ante. I wedged the trap between a step-in fence stake and a heavy piece of wood. I baited the trap with some leftover corn tortillas that wouldn’t fall through the spaces and hoped I would find my adversary neatly caged in the morning. I have been outsmarted by a cat-sized, masked, ring-tailed mammal. The trap was sprung. One of the tortillas had been dragged to the end of the trap and half of it had been nibbled away. I’m beginning to wonder how long this will continue. Will the evil monster figure out how to get into the coop itself (the last one managed to shift a brick from in front of the hatch to open the door and had killed two hens and fatally injured another before my husband and I had a chance to respond the ruckus). Distressed chickens make a horrible racket. Have I mentioned that I HATE raccoons?