I got this raccoon in my Duke cage trap. I've had two amazing things happen with this trap. One of them is this animal's ability to figure out the door mechanism.

I have only this short video clip of what went on, so don't know the before and after. But watching carefully, using the cog setting in Vimeo to get 0.5x speed, you can see that when he bumps his head against the door, he notices that the bottom will open a little, and that the hog ring can jostle up a little but keeps the door from opening more.

In a flash he puts 2 + 2 together, flips over on his feet, grabs the ring with his jaws and tries raising it all the way while pushing on the bottom of the door with his leg.

If the cage had only one ring, he'd be outta here. If he figured out there were two rings and used his paws to lift them both together, I'd be outta here.

Raccoon figuring out Duke cage trap

Heard they’re pretty smart

Interesting...good thing you took him out of the gene pool, lol

Neat. Thanks for sharing.

What is that black cord that it has in it's mouth?
Are the rings tied together?

Yeah, I've had to reposition and re-set this trap many times over the months it took me to catch a few cats and this raccoon. So I eventually tied the rings together for my convenience, but made sure the cord was long enough to be of no use to an animal in the trap.

Not sure thats what happened. You're giving that animal a bunch of credit. This may be an unpopular opinion but i think something fell behind the animal stopping it from backing out when it turned around there was a loose object and it bit it it happened to lift its head in the right direction to move the ring up but in no way understood how the mechanism worked. Neat video either way.

Seen a video the other day a coon working his way out of a havahart trap by laying on its back and sliding out from under the door.