Paintball Guns For Varmint Control?

I’ve recently moved into a new home that’s in a more rural area than I was in before and have been getting to know some of the new neighbors. Namely, a family of six raccoons that live somewhere nearby and come around my house every other night or so. You can see four of the little buggers in the photo below.

They haven’t caused too much trouble yet but I have caught them trying to get into my shed and even digging around under my deck and I suspect they may be interested in getting into my crawl space. They also seem to enjoy my fruit trees and leave quite a mess behind after they visit.

My wife and kids think they’re cute as a button but my dogs and I decidedly do not agree. The last thing I need is to accidentally let the mutts out when this pack of raccoons happens by. Raccoons can be pretty vicious especially when they’ve got numbers on their side or when they’re cornered. The ones I’m dealing with are not especially big but they’ve still got some serious claws on them. Also, while these seem to me to be pretty healthy raccoons can sometimes be rabid.

I thought about trapping but there are just too many of them and what would I do with them anyway? I don’t really want to kill them as they haven’t caused much harm. And I can’t be firing off even a little .22 in my backyard without having the cops show up. I’d just like this little family of raccoons to take my property off of their little map of fun places to visit.

It was a good friend of mine who came up with the idea of using a paintball gun to chase them away. Of course at first I didn’t quite get it and said, “So what, I’ll have a bunch of red, blue, and green splattered raccoons running around the neighborhood?” While that would be a pretty funny sight it wasn’t really what I had in mind. That was when he explained to me that you can purchase paintballs that are used for things like crowd control and critter control easily online.

Here’s a link to a site that sells some pretty cool rubber training balls that don’t contain any paint and can be used over and over again, as well as paintballs filled with a type of clear gelatin that won’t leave any mess behind. They also have ammo filled with capsaicin powder although these are sold to law enforcement, military, or security personnel only and are banned altogether in about a half dozen states. However you can easily buy empty paintball shells and fill them with whatever you like.

I don’t know how many of you have ever been shot with a paintball but I can tell you from personal experience that it sure does hurt. Those things will leave a bad welt right through a couple layers of clothing. I’m hoping a few well placed shots in the butt will leave these raccoons thinking I’m not as hospitable as they first thought and they’ll be less likely to frequent my part of the neighborhood.

~ Butch