Ha ha. My poor 7 year old son is really scared of racoons. Probably a healthy fear. They do kill cats and really kick the crap out of dogs.
Don't forget the rabies...
Camping near Atlantic City Wyoming during the first major snowstorm of the fall. It was a full moon. A shape was moving along the edge of the tent. Casting the flashlight into the darkness revealed a beaver...but it was no ordinary beaver. Its eyes glowed crimson red, and his breath carved trails of steam between his jagged gore encrusted teeth. It was no regular beaver, but the dreaded were-beaver of legend. I once though lt tales of the were-beaver were myths conjured by the gold miners of the 19th century, later expanded by the iron miners who followed, but that night after losing 6 of our party I learned better. I can still occasionally hear them chopping wood in the dead of night.
“They do kill cats”
The reason why we have four formerly feral cats living in our house. As babies, they were being threatened by MONSTER (nuclear?) raccoons on our property. Our house was on the river about a mile from Oak Ridge National Lab (Manhattan Project), and we saw some extremely odd and super-sized critters. And