Raccoon: Still At Large

I woke up at 1:00 AM to some noise outside, got up and discovered I had caught the coon. As I'm sure you can tell by the title of this post...that's not the end of the story.

I took the coon and trap off the back porch and moved it to the front yard. There's nothing there for the coon to get at, and that way my CG'pa could come and get it easily. I also took some extra precautions considering he had gotten out of the trap once before. I put a piece of metal through the front of the trap door and into the ground as well as a long metal piece through the trap right above the door. There should be no way that the coon could get out...right?

Wrong...I woke up to find the trap exactly as I left it, except there was no raccoon. He had dug a huge hole next to the trap, and I couldn't figure out how he could have gotten out. Both metal pieces were exactly where I had put them. At that point I decided to call him Houdini.

It wasn't until I got home that I could take a really good look at the trap.

Here's the trap as it looked in the morning.

I discovered that Houdini had chewed through the trap. Now, my dad says that Houdini just found a hole and made it bigger, but I know the largest "holes" on that trap were the few places where one wire was broken and two of the squares had made one larger rectangle. Now there are 5 cross wires in a row that were broken? Sure...Houdini did it. There's another spot on the other side where the wires are bent pretty bad as if he had tried to break the wires there as well.

Here's the hole that Houdini made.

Anyway...my dad fixed the trap. I asked for a gun, but he is convinced that Houdini didn't chew through or break the wires. I couldn't have killed Houdini myself, but I was going to try to convince my uncle across the road to do it for me.

Do you guys have any suggestions?