Jade Morton
Science/Nature Essay

Space Invaders I hate to even touch the trash bins that are behind my house, but the trash has to be taken out every Monday night or Tuesday morning before Sneed, our trash man, comes to pick it up. Before I get a chance to open the bin I hear something scurrying around in the trash bin, banging up against the insides. I freak out! I don’t even want to know what is in there. I panic, screaming my dad’s name like he could actually hear me as he watches the NBA game in the front of the house in the family room. I calm myself down and talk myself into just peeping to see exactly what is in the bin. I grab the patio broom that lay against one of the back windows of the house. I get arms width away from the bin, take a deep breath, and spring the bin open with the broom as fast as I could. The top of the bin fell to the ground and skid towards the grass. I went over to the bin to take a quick peek at what could be inside. My heart raced as I tiptoed towards the trash bin, like I hadn’t already made a tremendous amount of noise when I tossed the trash top onto the ground. I peered over into the trash bin and there it was. A mother raccoon and three of her babies tucked away in the left corner of the trash bin hissing at me. I immediately ran back into the house and told my dad what had happened. My mom over heard the conversation and immediately picked up the phone to call animal control, because according to her she would die before she’d let a family of raccoons invade her space like this. I thought I was dramatic, but my mother took the word dramatic to a different and elevated level. Invading your space? They are a family of animals who live outside like most non domesticated animals that live on this earth. So what was the real issue? Granted, I did not appreciate being scared and hissed at by the mother raccoon, but are the instincts of an animal in nature so different from the instincts of a human in the “human world”? There was still one more important question needed to be answered. Were they invading our space or were we invading theirs?
The raccoon has been able to use urban areas as a habitat. The first sightings were recorded in a suburb of Cincinnati in the 1920s. Fruit and insects in gardens and leftovers in municipal waste are easily available food sources. Furthermore, a large number of additional sleeping areas exist in these areas, such as hollows in old garden trees, cottages, garages, abandoned houses, and attics.
I decided to sit my mother down after she cussed out the animal control personnel over the telephone because there was nothing that they could do to capture or contain a wild animal. At that point a discussion had to be held about the alleged invasion of space. I simply tried to make her understand this. Let’s do a role reversal. Hypothetically speaking, if our family; my mom, dad, brother, and myself were stranded in the wilderness, what would we do? My mom, being her bad-mannered self, immediately rolled her eyes at me like I was the enemy and spewed out a few choice curse words that was later said to be directed at the raccoons and not towards me.
Are the instincts of an animal in nature so different from the instincts of a human in the “human world”? As a mother, the well being of your family would be an instinctual characteristic in a crisis situation. Food, shelter, and survival would be at the top of the list if stranded in an unknown place. If there was no available food, would we really ask the fish that’s in a lake could we capture and eat him/her so that we wouldn’t starve? Would we ask the animals in the area could we share with them the fruits that grow on bushes or on trees so that we could survive? Instinctually we would take from what was provided to us in the unknown area such as a forest.
After eating, as the sun went down, shelter would become the next task that would be tackled. Would we ask every animal in the forest could we borrow a space on the ground to lie? If we found a cave or a deep enclosed space that was suitable for sleep, would we ask could we sleep there or would we take what was given to us? Now was this so different from the family of raccoons that managed to eat and sleep in our trash bins? I could understand the fact that as humans we do not know the mind or instincts of wild animals. They are looked upon as being pests if they are within a certain metric number of our personal property. But if the tables were turned we could also be seen as pests to the animals that live in the wild. My mother, being a pessimist, continued to only think about all of the bad things that could happen with the raccoons being on her “property” and called a professional wild animal removal business. They told her that since the removal of the raccoons was not an emergency situation they would be there in the morning to either remove the animals from our trash bins or set a trap for them if they were gone by the morning. I had a problem with both scenarios, but I didn’t pay the bills therefore my opinion would not matter. I went down stairs to my room which the trash bins sat right outside of on the back patio. I could hear the raccoons jumping in and out of the trash bins during the duration of the night. I felt bad for them because in the morning, they would be extracted from the trash bins. They would be placed back into the wild in some near by woods where they would end up needing to find somewhere else to eat and sleep. The next morning my mom woke me up and in a merry voice announced, “We no longer have space invaders!”