National Post

Gary Clement’s Summer Stories: Rhymes With Animals
This summer, National Post cartoonist Gary Clement will be taking his inspiration from your summer stories. We asked readers to submit their best summer tales. Here is the next instalment of this series.

“I just want to warn you that they’re out there,” the ominous flyer in Richmond, B.C., reads. The ‘they’ is a population of aggressive raccoons that has so far attacked three domestic cats in Richmond, B.C., over the past two weeks, CBC News reported.  Wendy Thibeault said she awoke last Saturday morning to a rumble outside her home, where she found a raccoon “tumbling” with her captured 17-year-old feline friend,  Kokanee. Ms. Thibeault said she picked up a coiled hose and sprayed the predator,  which had a back-up partner hiding under a vehicle nearby, but to no avail. The hissing raccoon made off with her cat, prompting the family to post the flyer and warn other  pet-owners in their neighbourhood. Should the raccoons return, her husband, Richard, said he will use a hockey stick to “try to defeat the enemy.” Read more.

(Photo: Tyler Anderson/National Post)

Living with raccoons
Columnist Robert Fulford wrote an essay about the ubiquity of living with raccoons. Due to recent news, we’ve republished the essay:

Maple Leafs, schmaple leafs. The one true unifier in this city is that we all cohabit with raccoons, those masked bandits who rummage through our garbage, invade our houses, terrorize our beloved pets and scream at each other to no end. But Robert Fulford writes that they are as much citizens of this city as we are. In fact, he agrees with Tyler Brule that we should adopt them as our official animal. When was the last time you saw a beaver or bear — both on Toronto’s coat of arms — in the city anyhow?

Anyone considering raccoons should first cast aside the notion that they are a foreign species sent by a vengeful god to plague us. They are not. They are Torontonians. True, they don’t pay taxes, send their young to our public schools or use our health services. But they grow in number as the city grows, they change as the city changes and they take advantage of municipal facilities with eager ingenuity. Their enemies call them greedy, a term certain outlanders have been known to apply to Toronto humans.

Man arrested for allegedly attempting to kill raccoons with a shovel
A 53-year-old man has been arrested after allegedly attempting to kill a family of raccoons in the backyard of his west-end Toronto home Wednesday. Police received a call before 6 a.m. Wednesday morning from a neighbour who said a man was beating several baby raccoons with a shovel.

“You can’t refute that there is a raccoon issue in the city, but there are more humane ways to deal with it,” Const. Drummond said. “There are a number of professional services on the city website. Putting moth balls in the garden, for example, is one way of dealing with raccoons.”