aka another use for that low powered green laser.

I was out back the other night playing around with my new LED flashlight (1 watt Luxeon bulb), and happened to spot a pair of beady eyeballs from across the street about 100 feet away. I went back and got my 7x50 binos and soon discovered a large racoon at my neighbor's coy pond. Realizing that in the city limits at night it was probably not wise to be shooting even my pellet gun at the critter, I grabbed a 4mW green laser pointer I had borrowed from a friend for something I was doing at work. Since the racoon obviously had no care whatsoever for the harsh bright light of the LED shining in his face, I wondered how he would respond to the green laser. I swept the beam, which was easy to see in the air, right into his face, and the racoon immediately reacted to the light hitting his retinas. He jumped vertically, spun around, ran straight into a big hedge and bounced back onto his hindquarters, spun again, took off in another direction, and stumbled off the curb and down the road. I could actually hear him running into things after he went under a pasture fence. He was probably night blind the rest of the night at least.

Now, I'm no advocate for cruelty to animals, and I think that both the racoon and I learned something very important that night. First, the racoon learned that being at that fishpond is not a good idea, and I learned that green lasers are effective animal deterrents, at least on racoons. I'll just bet that things such as skunks, badgers, porcupines, and maybe even some big predators that pose serious hazards to humans could be deterred or at least seriously impaired by the use of green laser light in the face, especially at night when their pupils are dilated way open. At that power range, their vision will be significantly impaired for a good 24 hours or more, but probably not permanently as they won't be exposed to it for very long, and hopefully at a sufficient distance to avoid imminent attack. Now if it were 50 mW, they'd be leading by their nose for the rest of their poor blind lives, but at the lower power level, it would be almost like having a shock collar on them.