As I was getting ready for bed last night, I walked by the big picture windows leading to my mom’s backyard. I saw movement, and assumed it was the semi-feral cats my mom and my younger brother, who lives with her, feed… but it wasn’t.
I know, raccoons look cute… but do not mess with them.
I was just feet away from them, and they were unperturbed. You might think that a raccoon will run from you because you are so much bigger. They won’t. They will look at you with a ‘what the heck do you want?’ look on their face.
I do like the way you get to experience nature where I grew up. The Berkeley Hills, and my home town of Kensington, are still very much a part of nature. There are lots of trees, and wild, overgrown canyons running down the hills. So you get deer and raccoons and wild turkey wandering down the streets.
But you should leave them alone too.
Pouring My Art Out 
When I was a college student working on a ranch to make money for the next semester, my boss, an old bachelor rancher, was concerned a raccoon had begun snacking on a large sweet corn patch he’d planted. I suppose it was about 20 ft. X 40 ft. big.
The rancher decided the best bet was to set a trap for the raccoon.
The next morning, the corn patch looked like a tornado cleared the center section. The rancher had attached the trap to a chain that was about six feet long, and the trapped raccoon, terrified and in pain, had clear-cut and totally wiped out a circle of sweet corn twelve (or so) feet in diameter!
The lesson, of course, was that sharing the sweet corn with the raccoon would have resulted in less loss than using a trap with too long a chain!
That does seem to be a bad way to get rid of a raccoon anyway.
In Yosemite once, I saw a crowd of people surrounding a momma raccoon and her babies. They were pushing their kids closer to get a picture. The momma was pacing back and forth, getting ready to charge. I had to physically move some people aside… for their own good.