A Toronto Ontario man took a shovel to a family of raccoons that were damaging his gardens. Neighbours, woken by screams, called Animal Services. Meanwhile the mother raccoon came down to the injured baby that had been hit with the spade and picked it up and carried it away. A second pup was taken to Procyon Wildlife, a Beeton, Ont., wildlife rehabilitation centre.
This story has hit a nerve in Toronto where raccoons have become an issue. It has raised ethical and practical questions about how humans deal with wild animals in an urban environment.
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Samantha, named by a volunteer, now sports a bright pink splint. After quarantine, she will be socialized with other young raccoons rescued from the same area before being returned to a green space in the fall within 15 kilometres of the Bloor St. W. and Lansdowne Ave. area where she was attacked, as is required by law. Residents in the neighbourhood said Samantha’s mother kept returning to the backyard looking for her missing baby in the days following, but has since given up her search.
This story has hit a nerve in Toronto where raccoons have become an issue. It has raised ethical and practical questions about how humans deal with wild animals in an urban environment.
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I think he would be pretty easy to find, given that information in the article.
I am reminded of the lady who put a kitty in the dustbin, and how the community responded to her.
Just saying.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xLw5O3F53I
I'm not saying he should have beat it with a shovel, but they aren't so cute when you realize how dangerous and destructive they can be.
They have such beautiful hands.
Eradication doesn't seem to work for a lot of Synanthropic species. I mean we don't have to catch and release cockroaches.
Domestication is not an option, but perhaps some other form of co-operation.
Link to a TED talk about the intelligence of crows. Kind of relevant. At least introduced me to the word "Synathropic".
http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html
Water.
Problem Solved.
//and no screams - just glub glub glub//
People they're pests - if you want them wrecking your property - good for you - on my property they're varmints and they're nothing but target practice.
"..or got a dog..."
What? How is having a dog rip a baby raccoon apart more gentle then clubbing it to death with a shovel?
This guys only problem was that he was too much of a wuss to get the job done. You don't give them love taps (that is cruel), you have to give them a few quick, strong whacks on the skull (quick and relatively painless) to get the job done right.
A friend of mine has had problems with small possums somehow making their way into his apartment. He just wrings their necks (and, I guess, never stops washing his hands).
Pests should be gotten rid of, but if there's no need for cruelty, then it should be avoided.
I understand that people consider them pests, but to kill the raccoons w/ a shovel, BABY raccoons no less is just twisted. I don't care how you want to try to spin it.
I know no one would probably be making a big deal about this if it had been a rat instead, but that IMO would still have been twisted and sick.
BS. That baby racoon is as cute as can be. Yeah I'm sure they were annoying but give me a break. I'd want nothing to do with someone who'd take a shovel to a baby racoon. Then again, I don't like clubbing babies seals either..
Nasty, brutish, vile behaviour. Shameful.
If you can't kill something humanely, pay someone to get rid of the animal.
To all you idiots (and yes, I mean IDIOTS) who think killing an animal is wrong, piss off. If I get a raccoon that keeps coming around tearing things up I use my shotgun to deal with the problem.
Stop anthropomorphizing animals. And to Bozko (or is that BOZO) who said it's a small step from killing an animal with a shovel to killing a human, you've got it backward. The act of killing an animal doesn't turn you into a serial killer, it's that sociopaths sometimes start out killing animals. Don't even start to try to make this homeowner, who was only trying to rid his home of pests, into some sort of murderous beast.
Idiots!
As for the people showing off their false bravado - "where does he live?" - give me a break. He's easy enough to find, and threatening someone with harm is still illegal.
And a raccoon is not a baby seal. For one thing, baby seals aren't climbing into your attic, having more babies, and wreaking havoc.
Using your logic, every livestock farmer in America is a nascent serial killer. Get a clue.
Guy is a loon, plain and simple.
Yes I wish that on you, and no it doesn't bother me one bit.
The knee-jerk reactions are showing just how little thought people are putting into their comments before posting them. I don't think anybody here really supports a long, drawn-out, agonizing death for any animal. Although chelly's false bravado pushes the hyperbolic envelope; It hope it doesn't really reflect how little chelly values human life.
It's for the courts to decide whether this man was acting deliberately or just incompetently; either way, it's cruelty.
Actually, raccoons are cute AND they are disgusting, disease-carrying nuisances. The cognitive dissonance between those two facts, both of which are true, is why this post has 30-some comments on it while most others have one or two.
We all have them, but we like to pretend we are more calm, cool and rational than we are even metaphysically possible of being. We are deluded if we think we know what we would do in any given situation. You are deluded if you are able to sit back in your chair and say "There is definitely 'something wrong' with that man." There is something wrong with all of us! We are partially driven by passion, mostly driven by fear and desire, and only employ reason as an after-thought to justify our emotions or to condemn someone else.
I know few of you give a damn about physical neuroscience, but suffice to say that the entire organism is controlled somewhat through the limbic-system and brain-stem (Reptilian Complex). That is all emotional, reflex and instinct. Your thinking brain sits on-top and partially inhibits or excites your reptilian brain, but all of this is somewhat conflictory and disorganized and fed through the brain-stem before reaching the extremities.
A person like... drumroll... Phineas Gage, a 19th century railroad worker who was impaled in the frontal lobes by a tamping iron and is well known to introductory to psychology students, clearly indicates you cannot hold someone responsible in this traditional sense that some of you are doing here. It's not a "He's that kind of person". That is childish talk and totally deluded about what human is.
A few million years of evolution gives me the right to decide between "me" and "them".
Being on top of the food chain has it's perks. As does larger brain capacity (which most humans seem to not use), opposable thumbs, and superior reasoning skills.
For all the bleeding hearts out there - have you ever watched animals (of any sort)? They are not kind, or sympathetic, or nice, they are eat or be eaten.
It's called Nature.
Raccoons, etc can be pests to an extreme degree, but being downright barbaric to them with abuse is not excusable. It disgusts me how many people can rationalize it. You people do realize we have been taking over their space with our ridiculous urbanization right?
Like the few on this thread, trap and release is a much better option.
I use a lot of methods to keep pests out of my garden. None of them involve whacking or stabbing at critters with implements.
If you live in the city -contact animal control or whatever wild life service in you area. Both usually offer a cage to trap the animal in and they take care of it from there.
Skunks and raccoons are beneficial because they dig up the grubs, eat mice and small pocket mice.
As for the "brain worms." We have problems with hantavirus out here. You need to treat raccoon scat the same way. You need to be aware of the diseases that wild animals carry.
What are you doing ingesting it anyways? Really.