Soup can coonin’

By Steve Gilliland

During a normal trapping season, more than 75,000 raccoons are harvested here in Kansas. More northern states like Iowa and Wisconsin produce many more than that, for a combined annual raccoon harvest in the United States that I’m sure totals several hundreds of thousands.

Many of those raccoons are taken from areas that are also frequented by dogs, like farmsteads and municipalities, so a problem for raccoon trappers has always been how to catch the raccoons without catching the farmer’s or police chief’s dog, too.

Raccoons are multi-dexterous little critters that can open nearly any door, cover, cap or enclosure put before them, making it tough to keep them out of anything, quite unlike most dogs.

Trappers are an inventive and innovative lot, so someone figured out how to use that ‘coon characteristic to catch raccoons while excluding dogs, thus the dog-proof raccoon trap was born.

Dog-proof raccoon traps (DP traps for short) use some shape of cylinder the raccoon must reach deep inside to attempt to retrieve bait, in the process tripping a trigger that gently restrains it by the foot.

Dogs apparently lack the dexterity to reach inside the same cylinder with their paws. Various shapes and designs of DP traps are on the market today, but they all use the same principle to exclude dogs from being caught.

When Chris Ryan was 9 years old, he remembers watching the neighbor kid trap rabbits from large pipes at their irrigation business next door in Osmund, Nebraska. The neighbor boy showed Chris how he did it and Chris’ love of trapping was born.

As he began to trap raccoons along creeks and streams near his Nebraska home, one of his favorite and most productive ways of catching them was to dig a deep but narrow hole in the stream bank, much like a crawdad would dig, put bait deep in the bottom of the hole and camouflage a trap in front of it.

Raccoons love crawdads and will investigate anything resembling a crawdad hole. A few years ago, Chris began asking himself “What if the hole was also the trap?”

Several designs of DP traps were already on the market, but he envisioned a rig that would look like a crawdad hole when set, yet have a bait compartment of some description fastened below it.

“I grew up fixing and building stuff in my dad’s garage, and I’ve always been a tinkerer,” Chris said. So he began to build and experiment. He first worked on the trap part, which was round, and searched for a way to create the bait compartment beneath.

He wanted something lightweight and removable, and something economical that was found most everywhere. A standard size 3-inch diameter tin can filled the bill and the “soup can coon trap” was born.

The upper part of the trap is round and made the perfect diameter to fit snuggly inside a soup can. A clip specially designed by Chris holds the soup can in place, yet allows it to be removed easily by slightly pinching the edge of the can on either side of the clip and pulling.

A lip around the top allows the rest of the rig to be buried in the dirt, resembling a crawdad hole. A spring-loaded door covers the hole; when pushed down and inward it engages with a trigger below and the trap is set.

As the raccoon reaches deep inside for the bait, it depresses the trigger and the door springs upward, applying gentle pressure to the coons paw and holding it against the side of the trap. The harder the coon pulls, the tighter it holds, so most raccoons fight very little and experience no pain at all, yet are held fast.

Chris says he has experimented with 25 different versions of just the trigger alone, and probably more than 100 different designs of the overall trap to get the soup can trap where it is today.

He and his buddies are constantly fiddling around with new ways to use the trap and have discovered that it’s really effective at catching raccoons when hung by the chain a couple inches off the ground from a limb or fencepost.

Raccoons don’t seem to mind having to hold it still to reach inside, while skunks and possums shy away from it and thus are not caught. Chris says hanging the traps also keeps the mice from stealing the bait, which can be a problem with DP traps set on the ground.

Coons’ are pushovers for shiny objects, so the shiny tin soup can also helps attract them as it sparkles in the moonlight.

I asked Chris about some lessons learned while developing his trap. Dog proof traps are often “gang set,” meaning two, three or four are set in the same area, as coons often travel in family groups and several can be caught at once this way.

He said he once caught a coon in two different traps at the same time by placing the traps too close together. Another guy using marshmallows for bait tried heating the soup can with a propane torch to get the marshmallow to melt to bottom of the can and thus keep it from rolling around inside.

That worked fine. But he them buried them in frozen soil, and the hot can melted the soil around it which promptly refroze, freezing the can in the ground.

I like the concept of the soup can ‘coon trap. Using an off-the-shelf product like the soup can makes sense to me and is a novel idea whose time may have come, given the state of our economy these days.

I bought a half-dozen to try, so I’ll let you know how my soup can ‘coonin’ works out. See the traps at Chris’s website at soupcancoonin.com.

Contact Steve Gilliland by email at stevenrgilliland@gmail.com

Photos above by Steve Gilliland, photo on right from Wikipedia