On my walk to work this morning, I saw a raccoon trotting calmly along the side of a busy road. I thought it was a cat at first until I got a closer look. I was a little alarmed, not being accustomed to seeing raccoons outside of dumpsters at night, and my first thought was “Rabies! Augh!” It noticed me about the same time I noticed it, and it looked similarly shocked. It stopped and stared at me, transfixed expression on its little bandit face, and then it scurried rapidly into a sewer drain. It poked its head out to look at me a little longer, terrified but curious, and I momentarily forgot about rabies and wished I had my camera to capture the cuteness.

The thing that struck me as odd, odder than a raccoon in daylight of course - it had not been fazed by the cars zooming past it in the slightest. Of course it kept to the side of the road, keeping the parked cars between it and the curb. It wasn’t until it saw Big Bad Me, the lone pedestrian, that it got spooked.

This guy is the closest one to looking like my raccoon on google image search.

I tried to play raccoon psychologist during the rest of the walk, and musing over the circumstances, maybe I can see why the raccoon would be more scared of cars than of people. I noticed this same behavior in Lily the beagle, a shelter dog adopted by E’s parents. Lily had spent some time wandering the streets before the beagle rescue had picked her up, and was known to be wary of people. We decided to take her for a walk through downtown, to help get her more accustomed to people, and that turned out to be an utter disaster. Any time a group of people approached, she would tremble and try to hide between my legs (tying me up with the leash in the process). The most troubling thing she tried to do was to run towards cars. Moving cars. E and I could not figure out how a dog like that could survive on the streets with such wrong instincts! It was a very lucky thing that she found a loving home.

The notion of cars vs. people reminds me of a short story or maybe a discussion I read once about how, if aliens landed on our planet now, they might mistakenly think that automobiles are the dominant species. We as humans, apparently the lesser species, fight wars to gather the necessary resources to appease our automotive masters. I wonder if the same idea could be applied to animals as well - do animals think of cars as big, strange, smelly animals that go really fast? And if they did think of cars as other animals, which species would they prefer to hang out with, cars or people?

Cars are deadly, sure. The first sign of spring’s arrival is the line of littered corpses along the mile markers on the highway. In a match-up between raccoon and car, even a teeny compact SmartCar, car wins. Raccoon vs. human? If the human is particularly out of shape or small, the outcome is a little more dubious.

Still, there are some reasons why my little raccoon acquaintance might be less uneasy around cars than humans.

1. Cars are predictable. For the most part, they stay on the roads. They tend to behave in a relatively orderly fashion - in cities, they will often move together in big clusters because of traffic light patterns. They move in straight lines and angles. There are obvious exceptions to this, of course (see: drunk drivers, the elderly) but on the whole, cars behave consistently.

Humans, should raccoons ever encounter them, are far less predictable. Sure, they provide food, but usually not willingly. Sometimes a human will be moved to chase the raccoons away from trash bins, or in more rural areas, shoot them with pellet guns. Friendly humans can come off as aggressive, approaching too closely to take photographs (blinding raccoons with flash bulbs). Very young humans, in particular, are prone to shrieking and chasing the raccoons in an attempt to pet them, which comes across as aggression. Which leads me to point two:

2. Cars are generally not aggressive. When a car hits an animal, it’s not intentional; aside from a handful of bored rednecks, most drivers don’t swerve to try and hit the animal. As long as the raccoon stays off the roadway, it’s safe. Humans are another story.

3. Parked cars can provide shelter. Once a car stops moving, it ceases to be a threat to the raccoon (aside from attracting scary humans, of course), and turns into a resource.

4. Cars are colorful and shiny. Raccoons are known to like shiny things.

After going through these reasons, I still think that raccoon was crazy (and possibly rabid). But it was still super cute!

Spring time heralds the growth and blossoming of many things: dandelions in the yard, ragweed in the air, birds repeatedly bashing their heads into newly cleaned windows. Worms slither up from the soft loamy dirt. Misbehaving cats dash outside to chew up the nice grass, and run back inside to barf it up on carpet. An unmowed yard three houses down from me is currently home to hundreds of snakes, lustily engaging in the process of producing more snakes. Luckily, the snakes have been content with staying put in their serpentine den of iniquity thus far, and have left our premises unmolested (figuratively or literally).

Unlike some creatures, that is.

As mortal enemies, ants and I go way back. They invaded my room when I was seven years old. I can’t remember whether this was because I left food out, being a sloppy little kid, or whether being in the basement had anything to do with it. Whatever the case, it got so bad that I had to work the ants into the plot of my on-going Toyland adventures. Charlie Bear, Flora the mermaid, Pom-Pom and the other denizens of Toyland had wept during the forced evacuation, leaving behind some of the less fortunate Toylanders who couldn’t make it out in time for the mass fumigation. They even felt sorry for the Poo Poo people, the criminal element of the town that lived under the bed (aside: this contingent consisted of my least liked toys, which included Barbies. Though they were a permanent underclass, at least they fared better under my ownership than that of my cousins, who liked to let Barbies melt in the sun).

The horrors of that ant invasion have scarred my psyche forever. Though I know that I am much bigger than a single ant, the sheer numbers in which they aggregate are deeply disturbing. If it were up to me, I’d coat everything in the house in a sheen of Raid. Then I’d wait an hour or two and gleefully sweep up the remains of ant genocide.

Unfortunately, however, what is toxic to ants is 99.9% likely to be toxic to cats. My sister got around this by sprinkling the outside of her house with poison powder, thereby killing the ants before they even entered the house. An elegant solution, but one that won’t work with our furry bastards, whose favorite hobby as mentioned above is to dash outside as often as possible to chomp on that sweet, luscious, nausea-inducing grass. So I can’t very well coat that grass in poison - if they’re dumb enough to eat the grass as is, how will they know to stay away from toxic grass?

What I have done thus far: I have placed several ant death motels smack in the middle of their routes. Convenient, no? Alas, the ants appear to be actively avoiding the motels. I guess the free continental breakfast isn’t enough for these particular ants. I should gussy them up a bit, paint the walls, offer free internet and maybe some ant Skinemax to sweeten the deal.

I have also tried Windexing the ants. This has proven to be surprisingly effective, as the ants just shrivel up and die upon contact. It also makes the windows shiny and clear, further confusing the birds who keep trying to fly into them. It’s not the best solution, since more ants keep risking Windexy death to get at our sweet, delicious honey (now under the witness protection program). If only I could devise a time release Windex dispensing!

Another thing I have tried is sprinkling cayenne pepper along the ant trails. The ants seem to hate this even more than the motels. I watched an ant seem to contemplate whether to jump or ferry over a large patch of the cayenne. It ran out of time before it could decide (ha). I don’t think the cats are stupid enough to eat the cayenne, which is another bonus.

After the next batches of rain, I think I’ll go a little further with this cayenne pepper idea, buy a giant tub of it and construct a cayenne moat. Sure, the neighbors will think we are crazy, but it is East Lawrence and we’ll likely just blend in further.

And at least we don’t have snakes in our yard.