Er, boss... there’s a raccoon by my window
A DAREDEVIL raccoon left thousands of people on tenterhooks by scaling a 25-storey building in America.
Crowds, some of whom brought binoculars, gathered at the building to watch the animal’s plight and local media streamed its perilous climb for almost a day.
They celebrated as the creature, dubbed #MPRraccoon after the radio station opposite the high-rise, was caught at the top of the UBS Plaza at 3am local time.
The forest creature was captured in a live trap filled with cat food.
It was collected by animal welfare teams and will be released in the near future.
The raccoon’s adventures caused a stir on social media as it scaled the tower Tuesday, with many Twitter users voicing concern for the animal’s safety.
Others joked about the drama as its climb was livestreamed by several broadcasters.
Nearby Minnesota Public Radio broke the story and closely followed the raccoon’s climb. Evan Frost, a journalist with Minnesota MPR, told the BBC: ‘One of my colleagues spotted the raccoon on, kind of the ground floor, sitting on a ledge on Monday – it looked like a brown lump, ‘We went almost out like there a cat at sitting about 8.30 there. on Tuesday morning and saw it was a raccoon.
‘Two workers in the building got out a couple of long planks - sort of making a kind of ladder for it. I think it just seems like something a lot of different people can get behind. ‘It’s kind of absurd that I took a couple of pictures of an animal that people usually hate and think is disgusting, and all of a sudden it has thousands of retweets and likes.’ The initial rescue failed and the animal was scared upward. It then spent most of the day going up and down the building – occasionally napping on ledges.