Winter or summer, no matter the weather, two pails full of kitchen waste are deposited into one of our two outdoor garden composters each week.  Into those pails that live under the kitchen sink go coffee grounds, tea leaves/bags, eggshells, banana skins, orange peels, melon husks, corn husks and cobs, avocado balls, leftover breakfast toast, bell pepper seeds, and any other kind of kitchen waste exclusive of fish, milk products and meat.

We often used to see indications that a neighbourhood raccoon had been by, foraging in the composters.  They're clever with their opposable thumbs, able to twist the handles of the composter lids, to set them ajar and gain entry to the interior of the composters, brimming with what must seem to them like edible goodies galore.  We found them polite and neat, rarely leaving behind a mess for us to clear away in the morning.

We would often see them at night, startled by our suddenly appearing outside with one or both of our little dogs, before retiring for the night.  They might have resented our having interrupted their late-night repast, but they seemed good-natured enough about it.  The smaller of our two little dogs, a toy male poodle, was not amused and anything but good-natured about the intrusion of some animal on 'his' territory.  And that was a concern to us, knowing how, in a physical altercation, should one ever ensue, he would be dreadfully harmed.

So the decision was to use bungees to firm down the lids, so the raccoons would no longer come around, declaring defeat.  And then, this week, my husband, after all the time that has elapsed, saw that some raccoon had taken to defying the locked lids and had undertaken to destroy the sides of the plastic composters, laying them open at the air slits.  He piled bricks around those destroyed areas, ensuring that ingress could no longer be accomplished, then came into the house to convey the news to me.

We discussed the issue and decided in favour of the raccoons, after all.  Henceforth, gone will be the bungees, to enable those cleverly discerning creatures once again to lift the lids and take advantage of whatever they might find in the composters' interiors.  No use to us until it turns into garden-grade compost, and the wildlife might just as well take advantage of the opportunity to gorge.