A woman from Texas installed a cat flap for her pets to have unlimited access to the outdoors without having to ask. However, a gaze of raccoons soon noticed it and knew exactly what to do.
In a post shared on TikTok on Saturday, under the username @hikingchick1973, the poster says: “I installed a cat door. It took the raccoons about three weeks to find it and start sneaking into my house.”
The video shows three adult raccoons inside the woman’s living room, hanging out on the cat tree, which they immediately learned how to use. As the poster gets closer to film them, they pretend to hide, but still refuse to leave the house.
Raccoons, which are found in both urban and rural areas in most states, usually get close to our home to get access to our trash, which, for them, is a source of food and one of their most practical means for survival.
However, they can be very dangerous for both us and our pets. In fact, even those that look friendly can attack you out of nowhere, and spread diseases such as rabies, which is almost always fatal in both humans and animals. Even though not all raccoons have rabies, rabid ones are the most likely to attack.
So how do you keep raccoons off your property, and what do you do when they accidentally enter your home?
The Humane Society of the United States says that there are a few things you can do to prevent raccoons from hanging out around your property. You can use hot sauce around the area you are trying to protect, sensor lights to scare them away, or even a battery-operated radio tuned to an all-night talk show.
If you have raccoons into your home, don’t panic. The most important thing is that you do not try to handle them directly. What you should do instead is stay calm and confine your pets to another room, to avoid getting them hurt.
Open all the doors and windows and quietly drive them out by following them with a vacuum cleaner, and if that doesn’t work, leave the room and wait for them to leave on their own. You can always call pest control to help you deal with this issue.
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In a video update, the poster said that since she started leaving the porch light on at night the raccoons haven’t tried to get back indoors, and she hopes she won’t have to get rid of the cat flap to fix the issue, because her pets are loving it.
The video quickly went viral on social media and has so far received over 267,000 views and almost 30,000 likes on the platform.
One user, Gamera_4, commented: “If not raccoon door, why raccoon shaped?”
ThatGuyEdiis posted: “The cat distribution system is a bit confused … but you should trust it.”
Kylabreland wrote: “My grandpa used to feed all of the ‘neighborhood cats,’ his vision is horrible, he showed me, and he was feeding raccoons (the only cat was his cat). But he was bending down and petting the raccoons.”
Newsweek reached out to @hikingchick1973 for comment via TikTok comments. We could not verify the details of the case.
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