Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 35 pound coon

Pet raccoons can and often do get a good bit heavier depending on what they're fed and how often.

I'll have to weigh a couple next year. My first thought is that 35 lbs is a good size coon, but hardly a "record", but the scale will tell.

Back in the 80's we took a bunch of northern wisconsin coon hides to a big fur auction in Missouri. Thought we'd make a killing but nobody would bid or buy because they had never seen coons that big or that kind of fur. Southern coons have a denser finer fur.

Y
Mine easily went 35 #. Fed dog food. Sure got into a lot of mischief though. Boar usually made better pets than females. Females got pretty nasty during breeding season.

Probably some 40"+ coons in that bunch?

couldn't imagine living with a big city 300 lb Coon during PMS

Kilt a blonde coon this one time at band camp. Another big coon, he woulda been close to 50 I 'spect...

I can't believe I had to Google "Moon Cricket".
Being from Arkansas I thought that I've heard all the slangs for groids but today I learned a new one "Moon Cricket". 😂

That would be a giant coon, work a dog over.

Back in the late 70's and early 80's was the hey day for coon pelts, and I had an ideal setup.

My Dad was a jack-of-all-trades and one of his gigs were to haul pigs and dairy cattle from southern Wisconsin/Northern Illinois to the Milwaukee stockyards for a lot of farms in a 4-5 county area. Most farms had a good population of coons eating silage and corn and crapping all over their barn and equipment and living in the hay mow or outbuildings.. A few years earlier i made a simple guillotine door live trap from 1" wire mesh, a spring and a galvanized steel door and trip plate for a class project. I used it around our own place and caught of few coon, when prices were relatively low, but as they climbed I was able to start trapping the farms my dad hauled cattle from..I started building more traps and branched out. i was rotating traps from farm to farm, typically placing 3-4 traps at each and running 3 or 4 farms at a time in a local area. I bought a Springfield Model 15 single shot and was shooting the coons in the trap with CB's..The farmers like the idea of a 16 yr old with a single shot rifle, shooting low-noise, low power loads around the barn. A good farm we could get 10-12 coons and our best was something like 28.

The sports shop where we sold the pelts at became interested after the numbers we were bringing in and learning we live trapped them. He wanted the coons whole, as he also had a market for coon carcasses (We believe he sold them to the Blacks in Racine) and that saved me from having to skin them I also started building live traps for him to sell in his shop and a couple other shops, and was buying several rolls of wire, sheets of galvanized steel and working nights building traps to sell and to trap with. I had a nice little industry going.. Pelts were at an all-time high so much so, that you never saw any roadkill coons- guys would be stopping to pick them up off the road.

I think our largest boar that we weighed was 38#, but we regularly caught 30-35#. In 1978 I went off to college and paid for tuition, room and board for the next three years, mostly from coons and trap sales. Now, whenever I see a roadkill coon, it always brings back those memories

[
Probably some 40"+ coons in that bunch?[/quote]

No 40 pounders but mostly all in the 30's

No 40 pounders but mostly all in the 30's[/quote]
40 inch, not #.

Ok......

At the official weigh in......


Check for sinkers please

Pfffft...I've seen them run 400 pounds and still begging on the street

My dads neighbor in PENN was working on a vehicle in his barn yard one evening and a large raccoon came out of the cornfield and ran into his barn. His black labrador retriever saw this happen and took off like a rocket into the barn. He figured well this raccoon is a goner. Wrong. His lab was huge, probably 80 pounds, but the coon kicked his azz bad. Bit a chunk out of his ear and bit up his leg bad.

673;
Good afternoon my friend I see you're a tad cooler than us but we're trying hard to catch up, so I'm sure your woodstove is radiating heat like ours is this afternoon.

It's funny what moves in from where isn't it?

We've got turkeys and big Fox Squirrels moving up from Washington now, but have always had racoons as long as we've been here.

The old caretaker at the Oliver gun range used to feed the stupid things on the porch of the single wide trailer that was at the entrance for years. His wife had a dozen or more cats inside the trailer so I guess he figured he'd start an outside animal collection.

On one occasion when I went to the trailer to purchase some targets there were 5 or 6 of them that mustn't have liked the cut of my jib or something, because they started growling and nattering at me when I knocked on the trailer door...

I'm not ashamed to say I left post haste and shot without those targets that day 673...

Our daughter at the coast tells about some huge ones she calls "trash pandas" in her back alley in Coquitlam. She also claimed there were some B&C candidates on the UVic grounds too, but all I saw were lots of Columbia Blacktails and feral rabbits there.

All the best to you all this Christmas once more my friend.

Dwayne

We killed one running hounds in SW Florida one night about 40 years ago that weighed 52 pounds on a scale.

That blonde sucker is cool Don. And you must have stretched that big coon on a coyote stretcher lol.

Talking with a couple ol boys this weekend. One just got a couple new coon hounds. Asked him if he ever eats the coons. He said no, sells them to an older black woman in town.

Other one pipes up- “Ain’t that cannibalism?”

I about stroked out from laughing. 😂

I had a neighbor guy who ran dogs and chased the dogs on mules. He was making a killing on coons back in the late 60's all the way to the middle 80's when he gave up the mules. Back when coon hides were $20 a piece he must of had 100 by the end of the season one year. Back in the 1960's/70's that was serious money.

kwg