Heather Mallick’s war on trash pandas,
Surprisingly, Star reporter Amy Dempsey’s nail-it-to-the-wall feature on maddening creatures working by night to wreck Toronto is not about Premier Doug Ford and his election-cancelling minions. It is about raccoons.
I have the personal relationship with raccoons that I don’t have with Ford Conservatives, although at least one group is out to get me and my fake opinions. Which ratlike individual is it, though? Raccoon Jon looks very much like Raccoon Jane in the dark. It’s not personal to the vermin. But it is to me.
“Cities are like people in that they all have their own (rodent) stories,” writes rat historian Robert Sullivan.
I cope with violent neighbours, FedExers who don’t ring, drunk neighbours, and cats who don’t follow protocol. But the raccoon is Toronto’s shared criminal. Where are the true crime books, the novels, the movies?
Raccoons disappear into cracks the way a rat would. In the wild, they eat insects, mice, birds, fish, toads, anything really.
But I know what they like best because we share the same tastes: roast chicken and beef ribs. Raccoons don’t get that in the wild or even in crowded provincial parks. So they molest my green bin with their hairy, uncombed hands.
We had the small green bin that fit in the bin storage part of the shed. But now we have big stumpy ones blithely bought by the city for $31 million after they were guaranteed to be impenetrable by even by ace- the-test raccoons with glasses and a hacksaw.
Now there’s nowhere to hide the big green bin. I could place it beside the dining table to show small children how much food we Westerners waste, but moral lessons frequently sail past them. And the smell puts them off their mashed potatoes.
I have had to deal with rats — local construction makes them spurt along dirt tunnels — dangerous dogs and, the worst, squirrels wanting to move into the attic. But raccoons have cost us real money, time and plotting. I suppose we could shoot them with pellet guns but even squirrels laughed at those.
Raccoons have figured out which night is Garbage Festival. On the Monday night before pickup, exactly as Dempsey described, green bins wedged tightly between black garbage bins and blue recyclable bins are tipped over. Some creature has turned the handle. It wasn’t me.
Dempsey was told her handle had a screw loose. So the city tightened it, and either did it so enthusiastically that the screw destroyed its sleeve or, more likely, the consecutive beatings raccoons had administered eventually broke the mechanism.
So my raccoons climb onto the roof of the garden shed beside the bins with another purpose entirely: excreting rather than eating. There is nothing you can tell me about raccoon latrines.
Possible side-effects: raccoon scat carries roundworm which survives heat, winter and even desiccation and can lead to blindness or coma in humans. So don’t boil it or put it in your freezer.
So we got a $40 Yard Sentinel, an “electronic ultrasonic animal repeller” with motion sensor. It emits tones raccoons dislike, less a dog whistle than a raccoon tune. It seems to work.
This year, we bought a second Yard Sentinel, this time aimed directly at the bin, like Trump’s Space Force at God knows what. It worked, then didn’t. Raccoons can ravage whole streets all through Monday night if they so choose. They chose us.
After advice from a local outdoorsman who uses a bungee cord to seal his bin, we bought a kind of seatbelt arrangement. The problem is that I can no longer open the bin.
But I’m sure the raccoons could, so I store it inside the actual shed with clay pots, loppers, shears, mowers, ladders and old powdered blood meal (it scares squirrels). There’s not much room and the shed reeks but I have triumphed at some cost to myself.
I am smarter than the raccoon that was smarter than Mayor John Tory. The drawback is that all I talk about now is raccoons.
Skunks would be worse. After a spray, a smart person can’t hide in the house without ravaging it with what is described as rotten “cabbagey” sulphur with a top note of burning rubber. I don’t know what people do. Hotels won’t let them in.
Snakes would be worse. In Toronto, they’d be pet snakes. In Manitoba, they would be garter snakes by the bag, by the hundreds, in writhing balls doing sex with dozens of others, snakes in the washing machine.
I once hid in the house all day from a large centipede under a porch mat so I am too chicken to be the pest commentator you need.
You’ll want an Amy Dempsey, journalist, detective, scientist, calm person. Does she work on cold cases, I wonder?
You’ll need American sleuth Michelle McNamara, who used data to hunt the Golden State Killer, or Canadian criminologist Kim Rossmo, who helped invent geographical profiling of killers.
For this is Toronto. What was once the occasional nighttime raid has become an invasion. Read Amy Dempsey’s feature, IN1