Our first concern was for the raccoon.
The city of Toronto suffered a three-hour power outage, starting at 7 p.m on Friday, February 2: several people were locked inside elevators and lights were out in a particularly posh part of downtown, home to stores like Gucci and Cartier. Canadians are not the sort to display even mild irritation and I only heard about it because I happened to call two Toronto friends, A. and H.
What happened? As a representative for the electric company Hydro One put it, with the characteristic understatement that we love and cherish in our northern neighbours, “Crews have determined that a raccoon made contact with our equipment at a downtown Toronto station.”
In between giggles — because, come on, anything is funny once you add a raccoon to the scene, adorned with that mask, wiggling those little fingers — we paused to ask, solemnly: was the animal alive or dead? Probably not, we surmised, since an electric disruption that brought a city to its knees would have been powerful enough to jolt a wee mammal to death. But A. held out hope: “Maybe she’s out there, writing a little note to the city: This is to inform you that I have identified a serious threat to your infrastructure, and it is I.” Was there a hunt for the perpetrator of this accidental crime, a bounty on its head? WereTorontonians running around with cellphones and, gasp, guns or bows and arrows aimed at every suspicious-looking raccoon that looked like a raccoon as the animals evaded them, grumbling, “All of us just look the same to you, don’t we?”
When A. told me the news, I started searching for media coverage and found, to my surprise, that there has been at least one such incident every single year, for a long while. It turns out that the city has had a really, really big raccoon problem since 1925, when the first raccoons were sighted, reports Amy Dempsey (with Andrea Lange and Rick Sznajder) in the Toronto Star. Then, the general response was to politely entrap and release them into the presumed “wild”: the surrounding forests. But the raccoons had other ideas, for world — or at least Toronto — domination and by 1965, they had taken over the city: perhaps they felt their distinctive bandit markings were a kind of karmic destiny in need of fulfilment. Whatever the reason, things got so bad that one woman, after 13 months of trying to get rid of the raccoons on her property said wearily, “Though we may seem to be laughing, it’s only to keep from getting hysterical.”
In that same year, raccoons took over a 60-metre-long attic space that ran through the tops of ten connected houses in Little Italy, a common area that was nevertheless too small for humans to use. The raccoons “had clawed their way in and were holding wild parties, fights and races in the night.” It’s unclear what might count as raccoon parties, fights, and races — they are raccoons, after all. Did their human neighbours expect them to come home, take off their shoes, put on silken house slippers, and snuggle into armchairs with some nice port before retiring to tiny beds? The humans endured sleepless nights, terrified that the animals would drop through the ceilings and onto their heads, convinced that they would soon face a home invasion. Like unruly teens left without adult supervision over the longest weekend, the raccoons banged on.
And really, who can blame them? No one seems to have asked, what’s the point of a 60-metre-long attic space anyway? If you build it, they will come. Dig a few holes outside as makeshift bathrooms, festoon some branches with a few dead ones, hire a couple of burly bouncers and you’re now at the hottest dance spot, so cool it has no name and you have to know someone who knows someone who maybe knows someone who can get you in, maybe. Raccoons are cooler than we are.
And smarter. For years, raccoons went around blithely tipping over garbage bins in their forages for food, leaving messes everywhere for their human minions to clean up. In 2018, Toronto proudly announced the arrival of special green bins that were explicitly designed to be “racoon-resistant” (the city kept calling them “raccoon-proof” but as the manufacturer Rehrig Pacific pointed out, “you just never know”). The $31-million contract yielded half a million bins, and the immediate response was surprising: after having groused and grumbled about their city co-habitants for decades, Torontonians were suddenly overtaken by regret, sadness, and worry — at the thought that the raccoons might now be forced to go hungry and starve to death. This is a version of BBS, or Bad Boyfriend Syndrome: you hate the guy and can’t wait to be done with him, but once he’s packed up his things and left, you recall only his sweetness from that time he brought you fading roses from the petrol station, and the way the sun shone on his hair, and is he eating enough?
City residents were reassured by animal behaviourist and raccoon expert Suzanne MacDonald, who pointed out that Toronto raccoons, reputed to be the fattest among their urban brethren, have developed a fondness for roasted chicken and Thai takeout, plentiful in sources like dumpsters and other trash receptacles. The bins were equipped with a special lock that required opposable thumbs, and were hence, supposedly, impervious to raccoon attempts at break-ins.
They seemed successful when they were first literally and figuratively rolled out, but then the complaints started — they were either malfunctioning or somehow being pried open. Amy Dempsey, with something of a raccoon beat at the Toronto Star, set out to see how the bins in her neighbourhood fared, and even set up a camera to record any evidence of raccoon brilliance and malfeasance. The results were illuminating. In one video, two kits skitter on top of a bin that belongs to her neighbour. A larger raccoon, presumably their mother, comes along, calmly tips over Dempsey’s bin, and stares right at the camera. The kits climb down, the mother unhurriedly cleans her paws while waiting for them and, once they’re at the mouth of the bin, swiftly and effortlessly opens it, holding the lid open for them. Then, just before she follows their extremely plump bottoms towards dinner, she turns and looks at the camera, again. The first look could have been a casual glance, but twice? It is hard not to read a pointed defiance in her face and see an invisible third finger held aloft in the air.
Dempsey asks the question that surely occupies many in Toronto: did the bins make Toronto’s raccoons smarter? MacDonald explains that it’s unlikely that the animals are schooling each other and becoming smarter as a species: “They’re just trying to survive.”
That was in 2018, and Dempsey’s epilogue in the report notes that her family was already on its third “racoon-proof” bin, even after using bungee cords supplied by the city to literally keep the lid on it.
Which brings us to the point about survival, something that humans seem unable to grasp. We’re in the fourth year of a pandemic that authorities keep telling us is “over” and that continues to kill millions more than we are willing to count, we allow a genocidal government to bomb people with impunity, and the threat of climate catastrophe activates capitalist forces hoping to make a quick buck before we drive ourselves into a needlessly fast extinction. When the end times come, we will be wandering down empty streets, unable to disengage the locks that billionaires place on the gates to their carefully guarded estates. The raccoon that caused the electric failure died, unsurprisingly, but many others continue to thrive. A friend of H. has a house with a yard that she never uses because it’s been overtaken by raccoons, and her dog isn’t allowed there for fear of bites. The solution to their problem was simple: cede territory, stay away, let them be. We make adjustments, but will that be enough? Can we learn anything from raccoons?
Raccoons are survivors. Humans are not.
See also:
“Piglet.”
“Grief.”
“So Long, and Thanks for Nothing.”
“Aping Revolution.” (Podcast.)
“When one’s trash is another’s . . . house cat.
“PETA: Free the Animals, Hurt the Humans.”
“Racism and the American Pit Bull.”
“We Are Strangers Here: Notes Towards an Anti-Memoir.“
“Such Beastly Love: Animals and Affect in a Neoliberal World.”
“Season’s Greetings, Love, and Molecules.”
For more on the pandemic, see Rob Wallace and The People’s CDC.
For more on climate change, see Amy Westervelt & others at Drilled.
For more on Israel, see The Electronic Intifada.
Many thanks to A., H., Mango, Mei-Mei, and Wicket for the inspiration.
Image by Alexa Fotos, Pixabay.
This piece is not behind a paywall, but represents many hours of original research and writing. Please make sure to cite it, using my name and a link, should it be useful in your own work. I can and will use legal resources if I find you’ve plagiarised my work in any way. And if you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
