A very dear friend of mine in Parkdale has a terrible problem with some of the locals. I’m not talking about prostitutes or the dawn chorus of dry heaving. Not even the beardie-weirdie who repeatedly curses at the parishioners arriving for church on Sunday mornings. These are mere smatterings of village colour. No, the real problem is raccoons. At night these furry syphilitic delinquents find it entertaining to habitually tear up his garden and piss and shit all over his patio like a busload of English football hooligans on an away game. It’s not just a few either. On one occasion, he counted a pack of twenty-three. And to top that, another group of eight once snuck through the cat door on a commando raid, terrorizing his felines and eating all their biscuits. It was an unforgivable invasion and not a comforting prospect. He also has two small children, and after I told him about baby-eating foxes in Britain I think I put him over the edge.
The city has informed him that he cannot hurt or harm racoons in any way. The crazy thing is if he wanted to feed them, like some mad old lady, there is no by-law against that. He breaks the law, however, if he puts out a grip trap, which could harm prowling cats. He can’t poison the raccoons, or shoot them with a firearm. He can live-trap them – but only with sufficient proof that they’re destroying his property. He would then have to pay the city to relocate the animal, the price of which is equal to weekend family vacation in New York. That idea has been ruled out on moral grounds. Alternatively, he can pay a vet to euthanize them, but you try finding a veterinary clinic that will take a single disease-ridden raccoon, let alone 23 of the creatures.
I’ve offered to lend him my crossbow for some racoonicide, but the idea of pinning a raccoon through the chest against the fence and hearing its woeful screams doesn’t inspire him. I think it’s worth trying, as a sign to ward off others, but an impaled, rotting raccoon isn’t exactly ideal patio decoration. Two baseball bats with nails in them might work and we could then throw the corpses in a mass grave at the bottom of the garden before the sun comes up. Of course if caught, there is a $5000 fine attached to such endeavours.
The real problem is that raccoons are just too intelligent, and all of our efforts to humanely deter them are only further making them into the Einsteins of the vermin world. And it’s not just urban North America that has an issue with racoon numbers. Europe is being overrun too, and it’s having a significant effect on the wildlife. In 1934, Hitler’s right-hand man Hermann Goering introduced a pair of raccoons into the German landscape, and today a bestial blitzkrieg numbering a million is marching across France, Belgium, Holland and Denmark in their quest to conquer the continent. If we can hunt down 90-year-old former concentration camp guards, why can’t we do the same for the offspring of Goering’s mammalian marauders?
Until the last century, we traditionally hunted raccoons in Canada, using their fur for clothing. Perhaps what we need is a return to this fashion and get some designer like Karl Lagerfeld to make a Davy Crockett coonskin hat and matching bag set. Mass market it as an essential winter accessory, get them into H&M and The Gap and we might have a chance against the four-legged peril. They’ve done the same thing with the possum invasion in New Zealand, so why not here? In the meantime, my pal with the problem is trying coyote urine, splashed about his place, as well as Chinese firecrackers and a catapult. None of these tricks, though, seems as if they will work for long.
Mister Ford, you don’t really strike me as an animal lover, and I’m sure you don’t like raccoons crapping on your doormat. I urge you to come up with a way we can legally cull these pests and keep their numbers under control, before we get babies with rabies and our children become seriously ill from the droppings. It’s more than some of us can bare. I’m sure I’ll get animal rights do-gooders writing in to say how cute racoons are and what a terrible man I am for even suggesting such wholesale murder, but please, think about it. When a species gets too numerous, it upsets the entire natural balance. Human beings are the prime example of that. If racoons had evolved to learn to use weaponry, the shoe might be on the other furry foot. The worrying thing is, give them time and they probably will.
