Years ago, before I met and married my wife, I had a girlfriend for several years, and I was at her house one evening watching TV with her in her room, when we saw her dad go by the door of her room in a hurry with his 9mm in his hand. What the what!? So I went to see if he needed help. When I caught up to him, he had stood down. Turns out that he had walked past his own bedroom and stuck his head in the door to check on his wife, who had already gone to bed. What he saw was a face just outside the bedroom window, staring in at his wife, with its hands on the window sill, either side of its face. That's when he ran and got his gun. When he got back to the bedroom, the face was gone; so he grabbed a flashlight and shined it out into the back yard. On the other side of the yard was a couple of raccoons, one of which was so large that at first he thought it was a small bear. Turns out, that raccoon was big enough to stand up on its hind legs and look over the window sill into the bedroom, and that was the face that he saw.goose wrote:Having been on a couple of dozen 'coon hunts with my brother-in-law, I will gladly give them a wide berth. I have seen a single raccoon hold off four dogs on many an occasion. They are darn sure better at hand-to-hand combat than I am.
Later, I told a woman whom I worked with at the ER about this story. She actually had two pet raccoons, one of which she was about to turn over to a zoo because it was getting way to cranky to keep as a pet any longer. Anyway, she told me that raccoons never stop growing until the day they die, and if a raccoon lives long enough, they can get to be huge. They just don't usually live long enough to get that big. I've no idea if that is true or not, but nobody has ever told me differently.