Photo and Commentary ©2026 by Maylan Schurch
Friday, February 20, 2026
Take a few seconds to gaze on the mournful photo above. This year, a distressing number of my neighborhood’s lawns are starting to look like this – and some much worse. According to homeowners’ grim comments I’ve heard, this devastation is being caused by raccoons, who during the night systematically rip up these lawns in search of grubs. In the daytime, crows work the second shift, pecking for the grubs the raccoons missed. And the other day I even saw a sedate robin assessing the damage, wondering if anything was left for him.
Aside from sitting up all night on the porch with a cocked BB gun, there seems to be nothing a householder can do about this. Although the other day I saw that someone had tried the intimidation route:
I’m about to offer a suggestion, which is based squarely on no knowledge whatever of racoons, and only minimal knowledge of lawn care. I have no empirical evidence, and haven’t even Googled “How to keep racoons from tearing up a lawn”, still, I have been studying lawns on my daily walks, and have come up with the following.
I believe that the lawns which raccoons can successfully destroy are the ones (like my own, which for some reason has so far escaped the carnage) which have been neglected. These lawns are patchy, with bare areas and a bit of moss. But the lawns whose owners have regularly seeded and fertilized, have escaped. I have yet to see a healthy lawn, like the one in the photo below, which has been ravaged.
The reason, I think, is that well-planted and cared-for grass is awesomely tough. I would imagine that raccoons won’t even bother trying to tear up strips of this kind of sod, because it’s too much work. Those grass-roots are anchored too deep, too close together.
Okay. If my statements are factual at all, there must be a parable in there somewhere, right? How about this: A life which is kept spiritually healthy is less likely to fall victim to the Devil’s ravages.
And the Bible backs me up on this. Click the link below: