Raccoon Resistance

 

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. The city of Toronto has a special relationship with raccoons, or at least they think they do.

AMY DEMPSEY: We are not the only city with raccoons, but we often act like we are. We like to think Toronto is the raccoon capital of the world, and we’re strangely proud of that distinction. But we really have no data to back it up.

ROMAN MARS: This is Amy Dempsey, a reporter for the Toronto Star.

AMY DEMPSEY: Do we have more raccoons than say Chicago or Vancouver? Well, we don’t actually know. You can’t count urban raccoons. They’re all over the place.

ROMAN MARS: But who needs data when you can feel it in your heart?

AMY DEMPSEY: A few years ago, when a raccoon died on Young Street, Torontonians named him Conrad and built a vigil around his body with flowers and a framed photo and cards. So, if science ever disproves this idea of Toronto as Raccoon Nation, I really fear for Toronto. I think we’re going to have an identity crisis.

ROMAN MARS: But Toronto’s feelings about raccoons are not uncomplicated.

AMY DEMPSEY: Our relationship with raccoons is kind of a love-hate relationship. We hate when they destroy our grass and break into our houses. And yes, they do break into our houses.

ROMAN MARS: Maybe worse than all this though was the raccoon’s proclivity for getting into the compost, which the city started collecting for the residents in green bins several years ago. From the perspective of the raccoons, these compost bins were an incredible development–an all-you-can-eat buffet with the plastic and other garbage already thoughtfully removed.

AMY DEMPSEY: And the raccoons would go to town on our stuff and just spread it everywhere. And you’d wake up, look out your window, and go, “Shit!” And then maybe you’d argue with your spouse or roommates about who’d have to clean it up.

JOHN TORY (PRESS CONFERENCE): The green bins become a feast–a veritable feast for the raccoons…

ROMAN MARS: This is Toronto Mayor John Tory, a few years ago, dressed in a blue suit in front of a row of Canadian flags as if he’s announcing a plan to step up the war on crime. And in a way, he was.

JOHN TORY (PRESS CONFERENCE): There’s probably nothing that represents more of a nuisance in a big city like this than the feasting of the raccoons on the contents of the green bins…

AMY DEMPSEY: The war on raccoons sort of started with Mayor John Tory.

JOHN TORY (PRESS CONFERENCE): We’ve discovered that the members of Raccoon Nation are smart, they’re hungry, and they’re determined. But our job, together with our private sector reinforcements, is to show them that we are smarter…

AMY DEMPSEY: He said things like–

JOHN TORY (PRESS CONFERENCE): We are ready. We are armed. We are motivated…

AMY DEMPSEY: “We have left no stone unturned in our fight against Raccoon Nation.”

ROMAN MARS: The reason Mayor Tory felt so prepared that day was that the city was unveiling a new raccoon-resistant green bin for organic waste. During this same press conference, the mayor held up the new bin victoriously–

[CAMERAS SHUTTER]

JOHN TORY (PRESS CONFERENCE): Try to look like a raccoon…

[PRESS CONFERENCE LAUGHS]

ROMAN MARS: And hammed it up with reporters as cameras flashed.

AMY DEMPSEY: I would say it was 75% tongue in cheek, but there was also a hint of seriousness to it. It was pretty clear that he was confident the new green bins would solve our raccoon problems–confident enough to stand in front of news cameras and say, “Defeat is not an option.”

JOHN TORY (PRESS CONFERENCE): Defeat is not an option…

ROMAN MARS: But Amy was about to find out for herself whether defeat was an option and–spoiler alert–it was an option. Let’s back up just a bit. This all started the way most things start in cities–with an RFP.pdf.

AMY DEMPSEY: Yeah, they put out a request for proposals asking for a new generation green bin and emphasizing that it had to be rodent-resistant, AKA animal-resistant, AKA raccoon-proof, please. The company that won was called Rehrig Pacific.

DENNIS MONASTIR: I’m Dennis Monastir with Rehrig Pacific, and I serve as the environmental sales manager for Canada.

ROMAN MARS: If the city of Toronto was in a war with raccoons, this, ladies and gentlemen, was the general in charge of a major front. And he took his role very seriously.

DENNIS MONASTIR: I mean, Rehrig Pacific takes new product development very, very seriously. And there’s a five-pronged approach, which we initiate.

AMY DEMPSEY: Dennis is, in many ways, a classic sales guy. He wears shirts with his company logo. He has a firm handshake. I found him to be extremely helpful and genuine. And when he speaks about the green bin, you can tell he’s really proud of it.

DENNIS MONASTIR: It’s something that I’m very, very passionate about–not only being part of the design team, but I’m also a resident in the city of Toronto. So, I know what it means to me as a resident.

ROMAN MARS: Rehrig Pacific had a number of design criteria they were trying to meet with their green bin prototype. For example, the bins would need to be picked up and dumped by an automatic arm that reached out from the truck. So, the bin would need a lid that closed and locked to protect against raccoons, but the lid would also have to open up automatically when the bin was turned upside down and dumped into the truck by the arm.

DENNIS MONASTIR: So, we had to ensure that the lock itself disengages 100% of the time. The container must function in extreme weather conditions. Ergonomics–easily opened with one single hand. We were looking at safety. Kids end up in the darndest places–definitely don’t want them in an organics container. But more importantly, we don’t want them locked inside the container. The elimination of internal catch points–any material that becomes trapped inside the container could pose significant risk with respect to the ick factor for the residents.

ROMAN MARS: But on top of the ick factor and the meddling kids, Rehrig Pacific had to think about enemy #1, the raccoons.

DENNIS MONASTIR: Yeah, so we worked with an urban raccoon specialist to basically understand raccoons–likes, dislikes, their dexterity, what they can and cannot do…

AMY DEMPSEY: It was a local raccoon specialist by the name of Suzanne McDonald.

SUZANNE MCDONALD: I’m Dr. Suzanne McDonald. I’m a professor at York University. I study animal behavior.

AMY DEMPSEY: Calling her a raccoon specialist really downplays her accomplishments. She’s a professor of biology and psychology who has studied just about every animal you can think of.

ROMAN MARS: She may have studied every animal you can think of, but in Toronto there’s only one animal that matters.

SUZANNE MCDONALD: In Toronto, everybody talks about raccoons. I work in Vancouver a lot and nobody talks about raccoons there. There’s raccoons all the time.

ROMAN MARS: So, she wasn’t that surprised when Rehrig Pacific got in touch as they were designing their bin.

SUZANNE MCDONALD: And they asked me to talk to them about how raccoons work, and I did. Well, raccoons are omnivores, so that means they can eat everything. They’re mischievous. Raccoons have really good teeth. They’ll use them. They don’t want to use them. They want you to go away.

ROMAN MARS: “You go away! You’re in my yard!”

SUZANNE MCDONALD: They also get a taste for human food. So, once they get a taste for that Indian takeout that we’ve thrown out that they’ve enjoyed, from then on, it’s like, “Berries? I’m not eating berries.” We look at them, they look at us. Like, if you would look at a monkey in the face, they look away. But raccoons don’t. They look right at us.

ROMAN MARS: They look right through us.

SUZANNE MCDONALD: You know, they have pretty good senses of smell. They have pretty good vision. But touch is their superpower. They’re very persistent. They will work at a problem for hours and hours and hours. And they’re pretty strong.

ROMAN MARS: Rehrig Pacific took all of this information and applied it to their bin design.

DENNIS MONASTIR: There was multiple iterations of the design. There’s multiple photorealistic renderings.

ROMAN MARS: In the end, they came out with a bin they believed in. It’s an olive green, 26-gallon container with a lid that closes and locks.

DENNIS MONASTIR: We felt very, very confident with the success of that locking mechanism and the container itself.

AMY DEMPSEY: So, the new green bin rollout took about 18 months from start to finish. People are waiting for their new green bins, and people are getting really excited about these things. Before they were rolled out on my street, they were rolled out on some of the streets nearby, so people on my street would have to walk by and see that homes near us had the new green bin and we didn’t. And you’d sort of be thinking on your walk to the subway to go to work like, “What the hell? Where’s my bin?”

ROMAN MARS: But eventually Amy did get a bin of her own.

AMY DEMPSEY: So, on the lid there is a dial–like a handle–that you turn. And when it’s in the horizontal position, it’s open. When it’s in the vertical position, it’s secured–it’s locked. You actually have to turn it in a way that really would make it difficult, if not impossible, to turn if you don’t have opposable thumbs.

ROMAN MARS: And contrary to popular belief, raccoons don’t have opposable thumbs, even though they can move the thumblike digit on their creepy, little hands a little bit. In any case, for a while everything seemed to be going according to plan. In fact, some people were worried that the new bins were working too well. In other words, people were afraid that, without the green bins as a food source, maybe the raccoons were starving.

AMY DEMPSEY: So, the way I became involved in all of this was that in January of 2018, a friend sent me a note saying that he believed the new green bins had eliminated the raccoon population in Toronto. He actually used the word “eliminated.”

ROMAN MARS: As any intrepid reporter would do, Amy decided to look into it.

AMY DEMPSEY: I wrote a quick email to Suzanne McDonald, our local raccoon expert. And I said, “Hey, could the raccoons be dying?” And she just said, “Eh, they’re probably hiding from the cold.” But she would have more information in a few months, she said, “after I measure more dead raccoons.” So, I of course wrote back immediately and said, “Can I come?”

ROMAN MARS: Animal control was collecting raccoons killed by cars and storing them in freezers for Suzanne, who would then come in and measure them in order to track the health of the population from year to year.

SUZANNE MCDONALD: And I do this four times a year. And when you go in July, it turns out, and you bring out frozen raccoon carcasses and it takes a while to measure them, they start to melt. Oh, dear God! You can imagine the maggots and the blood and all the things, but that’s fine. I mean, this is science; we push through.

ROMAN MARS: Suzanne wouldn’t have the results of her data for a while, but while Amy was there watching her measure dead raccoons, she asked her…

AMY DEMPSEY: “Do you think it’s possible they could learn how to get into the new green bins?” And she shook her head no. She said she’d filmed them trying and not one of them could do it. She just said, “They won’t get in. The raccoons won’t break into these green bins.”

NEWS ANCHOR: Toronto spent a lot of money on the raccoon-proof green bins. And this was video that was put up yesterday…

AMY DEMPSEY: Then about a week later, this story comes out…

NEWS ANCHOR: So, watch as they’ll zoom into it here. Hold on. One second…

AMY DEMPSEY: It’s basically a local Toronto resident who has filmed a video of a raccoon opening his green bin…

NEWS ANCHOR: Let’s give that little tug. There we go. Smells good…

AMY DEMPSEY: And just kind of winking at the camera almost…

NEWS ANCHOR: Really?

ROMAN MARS: This was not the only report of a bin being broken into, although it was the first to include video, which quickly went viral, much to the dismay of Dennis Monastir from Rehrig Pacific.

DENNIS MONASTIR: For somebody just to come out and say, “Oh, the container doesn’t work,” is frustrating.

ROMAN MARS: The videos, Dennis says, don’t tell the whole story. A couple of break-ins doesn’t mean the design is flawed.

DENNIS MONASTIR: The screw might be loosened too much. And if you just simply tighten it a little bit, it might prevent the issue.

AMY DEMPSEY: Dennis is frustrated by the fact that sometimes, when people have issues with their green bins, they don’t call the city. They don’t report their issues to 311. Instead they sometimes call the local newspaper, and then it becomes a story. I think he said something to me like, “You know, when your car breaks down, you don’t call the Toronto Star. You call the mechanic.”

DENNIS MONASTIR: I don’t know. For some reason–Toronto specifically–they love to glamorize raccoons.

ROMAN MARS: The city, for its part, blamed the handful of break-ins on user error.

AMY DEMPSEY: And the city’s response was to suggest that these homeowners weren’t locking their bins properly and to emphasize they had only had a handful of complaints out of 450,000 green bins.

ROMAN MARS: The suggestion being that if Joe in Yorkville had a problem with his bin…

AMY DEMPSEY: Then maybe the problem was Joe and not the bin. So, soon after, I woke up one morning and walked outside and saw that my neighbor’s green bin was on the ground in our laneway. And there was food everywhere. So, I texted my neighbor and said, “The raccoons have gotten into your green bin.” She said, “What the hell? Can the raccoons get into the green bins now?”

ROMAN MARS: At this point, Amy had been convinced by the city’s argument. There was no problem with the bins. The problem was the users.

AMY DEMPSEY: I wrote back and said, “More likely that you didn’t lock it properly.” I still have the text message. And when I read it, I cringe a little bit. It’s like, “No, I don’t think you locked it properly, Caroline.”

ROMAN MARS: But Amy didn’t get to stay smug for long. Two nights later, her own bin was plundered.

AMY DEMPSEY: My husband and I get a group text message from Caroline. “The raccoons have gotten into your green bin.” At this point, I’m floored because my husband is a person who locks things and checks locks seven times.

ROMAN MARS: It seemed the reporter had just become a character in her own story.

AMY DEMPSEY: I’m thinking, “First of all, this is so weird. Did they know that I was looking into this stuff? Am I being targeted?”

ROMAN MARS: Amy called the city who said, “Ma’am, please, you probably just have a broken handle.” And they sent some workers out to fix it.

AMY DEMPSEY: And they replaced the lid on my bin as a precaution, even though they couldn’t find anything wrong with it.

ROMAN MARS: She also wrote to the raccoon expert, Suzanne McDonald, who was thrilled because she’s always secretly been on Team Raccoon.

AMY DEMPSEY: She wrote back almost immediately and said, “That is awesome.” And she said, “I’m going to loan you a trail camera, and you have to see how they’re doing it.” So, I get the camera from Suzanne; we meet up at the zoo one day. I go to our local grocery store, and I get a couple of chickens, put the chicken in the green bin, and rubbed some of the chicken grease all over the green bin. The first night, raccoons did not come. The second night, I went out to the front porch actually with my toddler. We peeked around the corner, and my daughter said, “Uh oh!” The bin was down. It was a mess. I took the camera upstairs and pressed play on the video that I captured. It’s almost as though the raccoons knew what I was doing and they were like, “Let’s give her a really good shock here. This one is going to go viral.” The camera is pointing at the bins, and then all of a sudden, this mama raccoon comes skulking out. And she just pulls the bin down, and she gets out of the way. At this point, you can tell she knows what she’s doing. She’s not going to stand in the way and get crushed by the bin. No. She’s going to pull it at the exact right angle, and it just falls down with, like, a bang. And she turns around and looks at the camera as if to say, “Watch this.” And then she turns the handle–just turns it–and opens it just like I would. And in they go.

ROMAN MARS: The key seemed to be knocking down the bin, which made the handle much easier to turn.

AMY DEMPSEY: When it’s on the ground, you can just kind of pull on it as if you’re pulling a lever. You can almost bat your paws at it or pull it to the side.

ROMAN MARS: On August 30th, 2018, Amy published an article in the Toronto Star with her video. And as these things tend to do in Toronto, it went viral. Thousands of Torontonians watched as the protagonist handedly pulled down the bin and then, flashing her glowing eyes at the camera, showed off how easily she could open it. Amy got a bunch of emails and comments on the article–people saying that this was happening to them, too. But the city maintained that they were getting relatively few complaints overall. When Amy told Dennis Monastir from Rehrig Pacific that the raccoons were getting into the bin that his company designed, he decided to pay her a house call.

DENNIS MONASTIR: You know, I personally wanted to go out there myself to inspect the container and to do some torque force testing on the handle itself.

ROMAN MARS: Some heroes don’t wear capes; they wear polo shirts with the company logo on the breast pocket.

AMY DEMPSEY: The day Dennis came over, my neighbor, Mike, came over as soon as he saw this guy in my driveway working on the green bin. But Mike had no idea that this is the green bin guy.

DENNIS MONASTIR: It seemed like there was a gang of neighbors that came up all of a sudden out of nowhere. And it was just like, “Oh, we have some problems with the raccoons getting into our bins.”

AMY DEMPSEY: “They’re getting into my bin! They’re getting into everybody’s bin!” And he’s just ripping on the green bins and the waste of money.

ROMAN MARS: Dennis took it all like a champ. He tightened up everyone’s handles so they’d be particularly hard for little raccoon paws to turn. But it hasn’t solved the problem. Having accepted defeat, Amy now keeps her bins tied to a wall so raccoons can’t knock them over. And she can’t help but wonder how soon before this knowledge about how to open the bins spreads to the rest of Raccoon Nation.

SUZANNE MCDONALD: Raccoons don’t teach each other these things. That’s called social learning, and even most monkeys don’t do that. And so it’s not like this innovation is going to spread across the city.

ROMAN MARS: Suzanne McDonald doesn’t think most raccoons in Toronto currently have what it takes to get into the new green compost bins–that perfect combination of strength, intelligence, and determination. Amy just happened to encounter an extra gifted one.

SUZANNE MCDONALD: We call her the genius raccoon because I think it’s amazing that she did it.

ROMAN MARS: Suzanne finally finished her dead raccoon study, and Toronto’s favorite frenemy is as fat as ever. She thinks that’s because even though most of them can’t get into the compost, they’ve moved on to a different solution: the good old-fashioned garbage.

SUZANNE MCDONALD: Our raccoons are not starving to death, that’s for sure.

ROMAN MARS: But she doesn’t rule out that, in a far off future, we might end up creating an uber raccoon–one like Amy’s that can get into just about anything. She studied raccoons in cities, and they are, on the whole, smarter than their rural counterparts. Urban raccoons are constantly having new problems placed in front of them to solve, and they keep figuring them out. And Suzanne and Dennis both tell people that the green bins were never advertised as raccoon-proof, only raccoon-resistant. “Nothing is raccoon-proof,” they say, which is a small concession that–while the front of the line is holding for now–the war against raccoons continues.

More raccoon news with our in-house raccoon correspondent, Kurt Kohlstedt, after this…

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: If you listen to the show regularly, you know that Kurt Kohlstedt has a background in architecture. But if you also read the articles on our site, you probably also know that he’s really into raccoons, too. So, when these two interests intersect–like say a raccoon going viral on the internet for climbing up a downtown St. Paul office tower earlier this year–he was all over that story.

KURT KOHLSTEDT: Oh, yeah, instantly. The local news is there, covering the story, on the scene, in Minnesota. But I’m out here researching the actual building that the raccoon is climbing. And I got super into it. I was analyzing the facade and the materials. I started diagramming and then deconstructing the route that this raccoon took to the top.

ROMAN MARS: And so, if you want a straight up Kennedy assassination-style deconstruction of that whole saga, you can check out our website. But before we get too far off track, Kurt is here today with a story of a different famous raccoon from nearly a century ago–one that eventually resided in a particularly famous work of American architecture: the White House.

KURT KOHLSTEDT: Oh, yes. History is not exactly full of famous raccoons, but there’s this one in particular that really stands out, especially around Thanksgiving. Her name was Rebecca, and in 1926, she was sent to President Calvin Coolidge as a gift from a constituent in Mississippi. But this raccoon wasn’t meant to be a pet. The idea was actually that she’d be served up as part of the holiday feast.

ROMAN MARS: Which is not the most traditional Thanksgiving meal.

KURT KOHLSTEDT: Oh, no. I mean, not today, at least. But a century ago, wild animals were much more common to see on dinner plates. Meals with duck or turtle or possum were pretty typical, and in some cases they were even regional delicacies. And then also sending animals as food to the White House for the holidays was a pretty popular tradition.

ROMAN MARS: So, the President getting sent a raccoon was maybe not that odd, but him keeping them as a pet was out of the ordinary.

KURT KOHLSTEDT: Right. I mean, that’s a little bit more unusual. When we think about presidents and Thanksgiving, we usually think of that turkey pardoning tradition–and that’s about it. But for Coolidge, it wasn’t that weird. He and his wife had tons of pets. They had cats and dogs and birds, of course, but also these really exotic ones. Over the years, they got wallabies and a bear, a pair of lion cubs, even a pygmy hippo–most of these as gifts–often from foreign dignitaries who knew that the coolidge’s were really into weird animals.

ROMAN MARS: But I’m still having a hard time picturing a pygmy hippo running around the White House, though.

KURT KOHLSTEDT: Right. Well, some of them, they regifted to zoos that could actually take care of them, but the Coolidge’s did keep a lot of them as pets. And they formed this kind of weird White House menagerie or, as one reporter called it, “the Pennsylvania Avenue Zoo.”

ROMAN MARS: And so what about Rebecca, the raccoon?

KURT KOHLSTEDT: Well, she became part of the first family, essentially. Grace, the first lady, would walk her around on a leash during the day. And then at night, she’d curl up with Calvin on his lap next to the fireplace.

ROMAN MARS: That sounds like a pretty good pet.

KURT KOHLSTEDT: Well, yeah. I mean, that’s one side of it. The other side is that she was still a wild animal, and she became kind of infamous for chewing her way out of her enclosures. And she’d rig a lot of the collars they put on her. And she’d claw up the furniture in the White House. There’s these stories of the Secret Service having to chase her around while she runs up trees. Yeah, so she was a bit of a handful, too. But she got to hang out in the White House sometimes. And the rest of the time, she got this little wooden house that they put up for her on the South Lawn.

ROMAN MARS: So, she’s a little bit of a hassle, but she seemed to have a pretty sweet life, Rebecca the raccoon.

KURT KOHLSTEDT: Yeah, she did. And she lived with the Coolidges for a while, and then the First Couple handed her off to a zoo. And there were rumors at the time that maybe Rebecca bit Calvin because, one day, he came out with a bandage on his hand. But Grace later wrote very fondly of this White House raccoon. According to her, Rebecca “enjoyed nothing better than being placed in a bathtub with a little water in it and given a cake of soap with which to play. In this fashion, she would amuse herself for an hour or more.”

ROMAN MARS: Wow. So, obviously, if 99PI fans have any more raccoon stories, they should @ you on Twitter, @kurtkohlstedt.

KURT KOHLSTEDT: Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

ROMAN MARS: They already do that, so you can add to the pile. Meanwhile, if you want to see some really lovely pictures of the First Lady, Grace Coolidgem and her raccoon friend, Rebecca, they’re up on the website at 99pi.org. 99% Invisible was produced this week by our senior producer, Katie Mingle, based on Amy Dempsey’s epic raccoon story from the Toronto Star. You should really read the whole story, it’s great. We’ll have a link on the website. Mix and tech production by Sharif Youssef. Music by Swan Real. This episode is dedicated to Kurt Kohlstedt, who enjoys nothing better than being placed in a bathtub with a little water in it and given a cake of soap with which to play. The rest of the team is senior editor Delaney Hall, Avery Trufelman, Emmett FitzGerald, Vivian Le, Joe Rosenberg, Taryn Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful… downtown… Oakland, California.