y.a.f.t.
I wondered what had happened to the Nazi pig-dogs.
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 …
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.
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?
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.
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!
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!