Air thick with hubris as mayor unveils new front line in battle against raccoon nation

Nationalpost.com
April 29, 2016
By Chris Selley

“Peace for our time,” Neville Chamberlain promised Britons in 1938. “I don’t need bodyguards,” Jimmy Hoffa told Playboy in 1975. “Mission accomplished,” read the banner unfurled behind president George W. Bush in May 2003, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. “The diet of raccoons is not my problem,” Mayor John Tory confidently pronounced Thursday.

History will tell.

Tory was in Scarborough to unveil new, ostensibly raccoon-proof green bins, and the air was thick with hubris. “With the rollout of these new bins,” Tory said in a statement, “we mark the beginning of a spring 2016 offensive against raccoon nation.” Confidence among the mayor’s commanders is evidently high.

The bins have a new internal locking mechanism, operated by a dial on the top. “Independent-designed field testing done by an animal behavioural specialist showed the bin’s ability to stop raccoons in particular from getting into the bin,” a City of Toronto fact sheet boasts.

No longer will raccoons foul our sidewalks with their/our leftovers, promised Derick Foster of the Atlanta-based firm Rehrig Pacific Company, which designed the adamantine organic-waste receptacles. No more will Torontonians, bleary-eyed and gagging, be forced to clean it all up in their robes and slippers.

“I think your bigger problem is, what are they going to be eating?” said Foster. “Because it’s not going to be the garbage.”

We must never appease raccoon nation. But equally, such provocative bellicosity may have been unwise. Surely it will only steel raccoon nation’s resolve.

As you read this, racoon strategists will be studying these bins, searching for their critical weakness. Engineer raccoons will be drawing plans on blackboards, calculating the number of animals, force and leverage necessary to crack them open and feed their legions.

If the limited success of past “raccoon-resistant” products is any guide, it might not take much effort. The new bins are designed to be unloaded into trucks mechanically: an arm grabs them and lifts them up, releases the lock automatically at an angle of 110 degrees, dumps the waste, and replaces it on the curb - locked, again.

That’s a tactical advantage, no question. But if Toronto’s raccoons can’t get a green bin to 20 degrees past horizontal, then I have sorely misjudged them.

If they crack these latest bins, then the Cold War continues. Life goes on. Heck, I live in a condo; my raccoon-battling days are behind me. If anything, I’m more worried that Foster and his colleagues might actually have succeeded in producing a raccoon-proof green bin.

If so, I fear the raccoons’ diet will very quickly become very much John Tory’s “problem” - and everyone else’s besides. Raccoons have never taken no for an answer on anything. There is no reason to believe they would on the question of their very survival.

If we defeat raccoon nation in our driveways and on the curbside, we may soon find ourselves battling them in our pantries, kitchens and dining rooms. Reports suggest many have already infiltrated our attics. If we deny them table scraps, they may decide to take what they need straight from the oven. And they have very sharp claws.

Eleven months after Chamberlain’s promise, Hitler invaded Poland. American troops didn’t leave Iraq for more than eight years after Bush’s speech. The Playboy interview was the last Hoffa ever gave.

I feel a similar, terrible foreboding.