Oh! Neat! We have a raccoon..............Can I kill it?

A few weeks ago we saw a raccoon in your yard.  It was such fun to see yet another wild animal that lives on Whidbey Island.    Whenever we saw it we'd yell to the other person, excitedly, to "come look!"

Then, it started showing up more and more regularly. 

THEN, it started climbing up the supports for our back deck and knocking the bird feeders off.

THEN, it started coming around at night and turning on our motion-sensitive lights, waking us up and scaring the bejezus out of us.

THEN, it started ripping apart the Hosta plants where bird seed sometimes falls.

THEN, we saw it disappearing under our porch several times, leading us to wonder whether it was living there.

And all of a sudden we were done with our new pet.  Go away!

And for some reason, it did.  Haven't seen it for several weeks now. 

I'd think that raccoons were awfully sensitive to danger, running when they picked up the vibes from us that we were (not seriously) ready to kill it, but then I saw this:

Someone really snapped a photo of a raccoon hopping a ride on an aligator.

I think the reason our new pet left us was not because it was frightened of us, but because the food was better elsewhere.  I hope it's OK, but I also hope it likes its new place really really well.