back to article Amphibious Nazi raccoons menace Sweden

Sweden is bracing for an amphibious assault by a considerable force of raccoon dogs and raccoons, poised to cross the Öresund strait which separates the country from neighbouring Denmark. Raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides) are native to east Asia, where their populations are actually declining, but they have made …

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  1. proto-robbie
    Pirate

    y.a.f.t.

    I wondered what had happened to the Nazi pig-dogs.

  2. TeeCee Gold badge

    Is there a prize on offer...

    .....for the first Raccoon to swim the channel?

  3. John Hawkins

    My rifle is loaded

    D*mn right we don't want them here; I've got food and water in my cellar, plenty of ammo and a big shovel I can hit them with if I feel a need for gratuitous violence.

    1. Bumpy Cat
      Happy

      Overreaction

      Are they zombie raccoons too? A stern "no!" and a locking bin would do the job.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Headmaster

    Wrong Branch of the Service

    Goering was head of the Luftwaffe. Flying squirrels and the like.

    Raeder or Doenitz would be more interested in sea faring raccoons.

  5. Arctic fox
    IT Angle

    It's all right, no need to panic.

    When they reach Skåne they will realise they do not understand a word the locals* are saying and they'll turn round and swim straight back.

    *Nobody in the rest of Sweden understands what folk from Skåne are saying.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Nonsense

      They're coming from Denmark, compared to Danish the whole 'Bork! put de chicken in de pot! Bork!' dialect of Southern Sweden will be a breeze.

      BTW. There's a sense of justice to all this. Now the Swedes are finding out what it was like to be English a thousand years ago - living in constant fear of an invasion from the sea of ferocious Scandinavian hairy rabid killers.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    I note that the author of the Sun piece was none other than...

    ...Julie Moult, who featured in this fine Reg article :

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/28/julie_moult_googlebomb/

  7. Yag
    Trollface

    "There's nothing wrong with the species. We just don't want them here."

    Racists!

  8. disgruntled yank

    Wouldn't want them either

    Raccoons are fine in their place, which IMHO is at the top of a pine tree with hounds baying around the trunk. As a neighbor in city or suburbs they have their faults, among them a taste for garbage & the dexterity to get into any but a well-secured can (locking handles or bungee cords work best), also a high incidence of rabies in some areas. They are meaner than sin, and more than a match for most dogs.

    IF the mercurial HG wanted to hunt raccoons, why didn't he just take a vacation in the American South?

  9. Armando 123
    Mushroom

    Fortunately we have a solution!

    Just import honey badgers to stave them off. What could possibly go wrong then?

    1. ArmanX
      Mushroom

      Hmm, yes...

      I would suggest killer bees, fire ants, and/or Rasberry crazy ants, but I think it's too cold up there for that.

    2. Steven Roper
      Stop

      No, no, no!

      Take it from our bitter experience here in Australia. We grow lots of sugar here. A pest, the cane beetle, was devastating our sugar crops. So we imported cane toads to eat the beetles. The problem is that there's not much that can eat cane toads. Which means that football-sized, deadly poisonous toads are now infesting the northern half of the country in their billions, and are threatening to invade the southern half. You can imagine the effect these fuckers are having on our wildlife, not to mention the hazards of driving down a toad-guts-slicked-up road coated with the stinking mangled innards of millions of the things...

      So unless you want to potentially end up with a plague of honey badgers, I would venture that that is a bad idea. Badgers of all species are supposedly quite vicious, I believe? Not the sort of creature you want infesting your barns and pantries like rats. Especially considering you have rabies in that part of the world.

      Viral/bacteriological warfare is much more effective and can be more precisely controlled. Here, we've used the artificially engineered rabbit-specific diseases myxomatosis and later calicivirus to effectively control our feral rabbit population. Your R&D organisations would be better off looking at a similar solution rather than trying to import feral predators.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Amphibious Nazi raccoons menace Sweden

    "They're good swimmers....But neither the open sea nor high waves are going to scare them off."

    Fill the Öresund strait with raccoon* eating piranha, problem solved. You could also nuke Denmark from orbit, but that would probably be a little extreme.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Childcatcher

    Raccoon mystery solved

    Fact: Raccoons run rampant in Denmark and moving to Sweden then maybe Finland

    Question: Who in Northern Europe likes raccoons?

    Answer: Andrew Tanenbaum lives in the Netherlands and likes raccoons:

    http://wiki.minix3.org/en/MinixMascot

    Conclusion:

    The Kassel Germany raccoon story is a ruse, as Amsterdam is only ~400k away from Kassel.

    These are not regular raccoons but *cyborg* raccoons that run Minix as the kernel.

    Revenge against a particular Finn who also speaks Swedish and wrote a competing kernel.

    Mystery solved. To the batmobile Watson!

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Devil

    Thus it begins....

    The dreaded and long-fortold "Day of the Racoon" is upon us!!

    Seriously, these little varmints (that can now be a Swedish word--sounds vaguely nordic) are a real pain. We have suburban sewer-dwelling racoons in my neighborhood in the States, and they have been known to kill local cats and small dogs and of course raid local garbage cans. The best thing I can say about them is that they also eat the snails, of which we would otherwise have too many of.

    To our Swedish friends, I extend a little advice beyond prayer. Bungee cord the tops of your garbage bins, and if you have composting bins with fruits or vegatables in them, bungee those too. Keep small pets indoors at night and make sure any decks that a person cannot easily fit under, storage sheds, chicken or other bird coops, attics that can be accessed from nearby treetops and crawlspaces underneath houses are closed with well-secured wire mesh. I use what is known in North America as "hardware cloth", which is a somewhat fine wire mesh, sunk down into the ground about a 30 centimeters (Fiendish European racoons have adopted the metric system!) to keep racoons and other pests from burrowing under my deck and raising rodent families there.

    Lights aren't very practical and racoons get used to them if they find out that lights going on don't equate to someone or something coming outside and harrassing the racoons. Those ultrasound devices dont work well. If you have big, outdoor dogs, that can work though, but they can also get rabies and distemper from racoons if the pests are carrying those diseases.

    Good luck!

  13. mhenriday
    Unhappy

    Denmark has already fallen

    and Sweden is threatened. Is this a re-run on TV, or a new remake ?...

    Henri

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