Woman's 'innocent' habit results in over 100 portly raccoons swarming her home demanding food

We were always warned against feeding wildlife. Cautions about them becoming too comfortable with human interaction creating dangerous situations and the animals becoming too dependent on people providing them food interfering with their natural instincts. This is why it's discouraged for people to adopt wild animals as pets unless they're injured to the point of never being able to return to the wild.

Even with this information being fairly common knowledge, it doesn't always stop people from wanting to try their hand at becoming Princess Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. People commonly feed the squirrels, birds and deer local to their backyards without much second thought.

This normalizing of feeding certain wild critters also regularly includes people feeding raccoons , maybe in an effort to keep them out of their trash or maybe because the little trash bandits look that chubby cats with hands. Either way, this can quickly escalate either immediately or years after the fact as one Washington woman recently discovered.

The unnamed woman has been feeding the raccoons in her backyard since sometime in the 80s for a total of more than 35 years. She never had any issue as there were only ever a few raccoons that she would throw some food to in the evenings and for the most part, they left each other alone.

brown and black animal on brown soil Photo by Pete Nuij on Unsplash

Now, people can only speculate how sophisticated communication is between animals but raccoons are extremely intelligent. Best guess is, one of the raccoons the woman has been feeding lately turned out to be the town gossip causing word to quickly spread that a human was offering free food. Since these masked critters are savvy scavengers, they generally have to work pretty hard to outsmart the humans trying to keep them out of their trashcans.

But if someone's just going to make the raccoons lives easier by putting out tasty treats, of course the little round guys are going to take advantage of it. That's exactly what happened. One of the raccoons told a friend who told a friend and suddenly when the woman came home from an errand, all of these friends were there to greet her–over 100 of them.

cookie crisp raccoons GIF by ViralHog Giphy

The reunion was anything but happy, though. The gaze of raccoons refused to let the woman into her home, becoming aggressive towards her as they demanded she give them food. It quickly becomes clear to the woman that she was going to need assistance so who do you call when a group of bandits are at your door? The sheriff. At least that's what the woman thought.

The Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office did respond to the woman's call and were shocked at the ridiculous number of raccoons surrounding her home. Kevin McCarty, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office tells CNN , "They had never seen that many raccoons in one place. Nobody ever remembers being surrounded by a swarm of raccoons. This was a first.”

raccoons wants GIF Giphy

The raccoons don't seem to give the woman any peace. Their consistent presence has been going on for more than six weeks now. Day and night, enough raccoons to fill several classrooms harass the woman for food. It's not clear if she throws them food in an attempt to get them to leave her alone long enough to get in and out of her house but she currently has no help.

The Sheriff's office referred her to Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife but she informed deputies that Fish and Wildlife told her it would cost $500 per raccoon to trap and relocate. Animal control is currently looking for a reasonable solution and McCarty shares a reminder, "Don’t feed wild animals. When wild animals have a reliable food source, they’re going to keep coming back to it, and that’s what these raccoons did until the number of raccoons expecting a meal got out of hand."

racoon GIF Giphy

The spokesperson says to KOMO News, "wild raccoons are not safe to toy with. People shouldn't get near them, they certainly shouldn't feed them and obviously, word got out in raccoon land so a lot of them are showing up cause they expect that they're going to get a meal."

People are flabbergasted on how this got so far out of hand with one person writing in part, "How in the world?! Didn't anyone suggest, firmly, that she needed to STOP feeding them?!"

One commenter under the news video suggests, "They could put the food away from the residence to re-train the raccoons where they can find food then taper the food supply."

People in town have said they've seen more raccoons around their own homes and in town. Hopefully this gets resolved in a way that keeps the animals and humans safe and the woman has learned feeding these cute masked bandits isn't such a great idea.

Watch the video below: