Moxie Mom On Life and Kids

Nighttime Visitor

We have a new cat door coming today via UPS, whose arrival we're anxiously awaiting because we're leaving town for ten days on Friday, and we have an an unwelcome visitor most nights who tries to get into the house through the cat door (now that we've taken to locking it, the catfood is no longer disappearing, but the cats are still peeved they have to stay inside when we lock up).

About a month ago, we noticed when we got up in the morning that the catfood was gone, the water bowl was a mess, and  the food bag was tipped over. On the second  morning, we found Ty's lunchbox by the backdoor with a peanut butter sandwich expertly pulled out through a 3-inch opening and peeled apart. Hmm, awfully sophisticated for cats. And when I saw kibbles in the water bowl, my first thought was, that is the action of a raccoon.

Raccoon? Surely not. Not with a magnetized cat door.

On the third day, when Curt was out of town, I stayed up late with the cats to watch a movie. After it was over, the three of us ambled into the kitchen, where I felt a presence in the air that put me on double alert. Or, rather, I sensed a presence had just left the kitchen. Not a thief, though. Or at least not a human thief. The cats felt it too, and I looked at them, and they looked at me, and we all looked at the cat door and then back at each other. And I was thinking, well, that's just great, I'm in charge here. There's nothing quite so unnerving as feeling in charge -- with cats -- when something creepy just happened. How is it my husband manages to miss all the big moments (the two times I barfed during pregnancy, the day I found a dead possum in the garage, the weekend our cat died, and now the night we're feeling on edge and no solid, male presence)?

But we're tough.  Thank goodness we don't live in Alaska, though, where the predators are so much bigger. I opened the backdoor in time to see a ringed tail waltzing off in the dark toward our fence. The cats flew out the door and huffed around the patio with their tails puffed and their backs arched, ready to take on the wildlife world. Um, yeah, kitties, hate to break to you, but you will not win this one if you engage in a fight.

Well, what to do except bring the cats in and lock the cat door, much to their chagrin. At least we determined who our visitor is.

And so because we don't like the idea of a raccoon going through our cupboards, we've been locking the cat door ever since (we figured out it is ever so easy to open the cat door outward from the outside with something like a little nail, or a raccoon fingernail, as must be the case -- unless the bugger is buying magnets on the black market.)

But we're investing in a raccoon-proof door so we don't have to remember to lock the cat door every night because whenever we forget, that rascal is in the kitchen in a flash. The other night I heard the door banging around, and I went down the stairs to stare through the [locked] cat door window  at the little raccoon face on the other side. She/he stared back for 30 seconds and then took off.

Anyway, If you need to solve your own cat door problems, feel free to give me a shout. I've done the research. Don't ask me to help with dead possums, though. I learned that's my limit.