Mother Jones
We have been besieged lately by a possum who comes in through the cat door and hoovers up Domino’s cat food. This is Not Good. I tried and tried to trap him using cat food as bait, but he was too smart for that. He only wanted the food that was actually in Domino’s bowl. Then, a couple of days ago, I foolishly left a package of cookies on a coffee table that’s low enough to be possum accessible. When I woke up, it looked like a bomb had gone off in the living room. Cookie crumbs were everywhere.
Stupid possum. But a little while later I happened to be on the phone with my editor, Monika, who suggested that if the possum likes cookies, why not bait the trap with cookies? Good idea! So I bought more cookies, crumbled up a couple of them, and put them in the trap. No dice. So then my mother chimed in: the possum obviously doesn’t want crumbled-up cookies. He wants whole cookies that he can demolish himself. Fine. I put out a whole cookie.
And that was that. I finally trapped the possum. As you can imagine, he was not a happy possum during his brief imprisonment, but I drove him over to a local marsh and let him loose. It seems like pretty ideal possum territory, and it’s not too near any residential areas. Hopefully he’ll now spend a long and comfortable life in the company of his fellow critters.
Original article:
