Toronto: the urban raccoon capital of the world

Full text

If you ask anybody in Toronto, they’ll tell you that raccoons, AKA the Procyon lotor (Latin for “before-dog washer,” given their apparent penchant for washing their food), are everywhere. The creatures have turned even the most gray urban spaces into wild landscapes, which have come to suit them far better than their original woodland home. There is no part of the city that they can’t master—or at least that’s what people here believe.

I want to test that theory by going to the most urban, concrete, and dead place I can think of to see if I can catch a glimpse. To my mind that’s Union Station, the epicenter of the city’s rail and transit system and the doorway into its sprawling and grid-like downtown district. If I see raccoon traces there, I figure, it will be pretty good evidence that these creatures have unlocked even the least accommodating micro-habitat across this massive metropolis. So I take the subway during rush hour, just as a raccoon did a few days earlier (after which it was praised for being so well-behaved), and emerge amid a crush of human bodies.

Union Station is surrounded by concrete sidewalks, made glossy by old flattened gum, which are in turn ringed by downtown streets filled with snarled and unmoving traffic spewing clouds of choking exhaust. All around, gleaming with an incandescence that seems cut out of the cold blue sky itself, sheer cliffs rise impossibly high, a canopy of skyscrapers reflecting sunlight among themselves, creating a labyrinth that partitions the sun’s rays.

If New York City has 8 million stories, Toronto has just as many—but they’re all about some crazy raccoon.

At the epicenter of this hyper-urban space, I walk through Union Station’s broad galleries, taking stock of the throngs of human experience passing through. At one point, the light shifts to a warm buttery glow, and I look up at frosted skylights etched with a branching mosaic of semicircular blobs surrounded by droplets that spread out and overlap across the panes in a crude motif. There’s something about the pattern that causes me to pull away from the stream of humans and set my back against the wall. The blobs and droplets appear randomly placed at first glance but seem to have an internal order the longer you stare. It’s a surprisingly organic, aesthetic choice for a space that is otherwise made up of straight lines and antiseptic materials. I like it. I follow the rough etched lines across the opaque glass to the corner of one of the skylight panes, where a single semicircular blob and set of droplets—five in all, I see now—are etched apart from the others. And it’s then that I realize what it is I’m looking at.

This isn’t a pattern etched on glass. Instead, it’s a layer of dirt and grime built up over seasons, with prints made by the press of raccoon paws. The semicircular blobs are from the carnivoran’s metacarpal pads; five digits extend out, short like a dog’s paws but spread wide like human fingers. I’m floored. While a nonstop parade of human beings moves through this space every day, raccoons numbering in the hundreds are moving back and forth among this static urban architecture above us. Here, in a patch of the city that is 99 percent concrete, a space that leaves no quarter for animals to survive, is evidence that the creatures are thriving, albeit just out of reach.

I circle the station many times, then move surreptitiously through the buildings across the street to catch glimpses of the community liv-ing on the roof. But no such luck. Later, I head over to a friend’s third-floor apartment, only to hear that I just missed an epic battle between their cat (Kenneth) and the slow-moving resident raccoon that lives at the top of the fire escape. It’s as if raccoons only exist in my peripheral vision. Like distant stars, once you try to look at them straight on, they disappear.

In the weeks that follow, these frustrating near misses pile up all across the city. Eventually, I realize I need professional help.

*

When I meet up with Rob Gordon at Cafe Paradise, a brightly lit coffee shop a few blocks from his place, he’s looking slightly worse for wear. It was a long night: between midnight and two in the morning, seated by the back door of his neighbor’s apartment next to his landlord’s cat (Jason), he had weathered an extended siege by a mother raccoon and her four kits, who were intent on breaking through the cat door and into the kitchen for scraps. Jason was hissing fiercely; Gordon, who projects a monastic calm, was trying to reason with the mother while batting her back each time the flap swung open. “I spent one hundred and fifty dollars on Amazon last night,” he complains, “buying coyote urine as a deterrent.”

Gordon is cherub-faced, with low affect, speaks in a laconic and analytic style, and has a wry and elusive smile. The times I hung out with him he wore black and dark blues exclusively, his long brown hair tied up in a ponytail that ran down to his lower back. Gordon is an exterminator—actually, a pest control expert—who’s been in the game for a decade. He’s also low-key one of Toronto’s most important musical operators, having toured for years as a drummer with the world-renowned violinist and composer Owen Pallett (who first rose to fame as a member of Arcade Fire), while also having started some of the city’s coolest venues, which at times doubled as his home. “At one point,” Gordon says, “I was living on airplanes, never seeing the sun, and working until five AM.” He ran through about ten different jobs, including barback, line cook, construction worker, server, and random shift worker, which he could jump in and out of depending on his tour schedule. One day his ex-girlfriend’s roommate, the manager of an arts space called Studio Gallery, asked him whether he wanted a quick and well-paying gig. (Gordon knew him from the arts scene; he had thrown an epic Daft Punk afterparty at the gallery a few years back to which the duo even showed up.)

A year earlier, one of the gallery’s artists in residence had dragged a bedbug-infested couch off the street and into the space, and it promptly infested the building; instead of hiring someone, the manager decided to deal with it himself and, buoyed by his success, started his own pest control company. It didn’t take long for Gordon to realize he also had a knack for the work, and he quickly became a top lieutenant in the nascent company. Still, he wasn’t quite ready to fully commit to pest control as a vocation. That is, until an incorrectly administered injection left him with permanent paralysis in one arm—a potentially career-ending injury for a drummer. After that, Gordon was forced to withdraw from performing. As he thought about the things he loved in life—his wife and daughter, mostly—he realized it was time for him to build something that could sustain them all. So he decided to strike out on his own. “I’m allergic to money,” he says. “So do I want to be running a pest company? Not really. I’m not even interested in pests,” he adds, “but I am interested in people.” Gordon calls his company Out of Body Pest Control.

When I ask Gordon about raccoons, he sighs. “I’ll see ten dead raccoons on the way to a job,” he says, “practically every day.” It obviously hurts. Gordon respects the animals’ capacity to solve whatever puzzle they encounter, but it’s their vibe that he appreciates more than anything else. “When I trap a squirrel,” he says, “the energy is insane. They’ll bang their head against the bars of a cage for hours until the fur is completely stripped and their head is bloody. I ride around with them screaming at me from the back of the van.” Raccoons are different. “When I catch a raccoon,” he says, “ninety-five percent of the time, it looks like a teenager that’s been busted for smoking pot: just kind of aware of what they’ve done and accepting the consequences.” He laughs softly. “It’s not like they high-five you on the way out, but they’re so bashful and calm.”

*

In one of the most diverse cities in the world, which welcomes tens of thousands of newcomers each year, a run-in with a raccoon (or raccoons, for they rarely travel alone) is a sign that you’ve truly arrived. The raccoon is a member of the Procyonidae family, named after Sirius, the “Dog Star,” which is the brightest star in the constellation of Canis Minor. Dome-shaped, like a furry armadillo, and ranging from the size of a large cat to a small border collie, raccoons sport a mask of black fur around their eyes surrounded by a halo of white, set above long thick whiskers. With rounded bear-like ears, a thick black-and-white ringed tail, and long front arms that end in finely tuned paws, they look like the Hamburglar in a fur coat. They’re also just as hungry and as cunning, and can weigh up to thirty-five pounds.

Raccoons are indeed everywhere in Toronto, a by-product of urban sprawl, which has seen their ancestral ranges become absorbed in a blink of ecological time into human habitats. Rather than flee or perish, though, the Procyon lotor has turned out to be uniquely adaptive to city life. Estimates have put Toronto’s raccoon population at an absolute minimum of 100,000 and as many as 640,000—an astonishing ratio of up to one raccoon for every four people who live here. And this explains why practically every Torontonian has a raccoon story. These include monthly power outages sparked by raccoons fatally attracted to the warmth of electrical power stations, which regularly affect tens of thousands of households. Or the time a person flipped their car over to avoid hitting a raccoon that was casually strolling across a busy downtown intersection (neither the driver nor the raccoon were injured). Or the time a raccoon, described by staff as a “perfect client,” followed a customer into a busy McDonald’s, sidled up to the counter, and refused to leave until it was given a Chicken McNugget. If New York City has 8 million stories, Toronto has just as many—but they’re all about some crazy raccoon.

It’s not just that there are a lot of raccoons in Toronto. These members of the order of Carnivora, which includes bears, wolves, felines, seals, and many other mammals that specialize in eating flesh, have found a way to reorganize themselves to take full advantage of all that city life has to offer. In forests, their population density reaches a maximum of about thirty-six per square kilometer. In Toronto, some estimates suggest there could be around one hundred raccoons per square kilometer, meaning their population is about ten times more dense than in their home ranges. It’s an ungodly crush, so clearly out of balance that it’s as if the city has been designed as a veritable paradise for the mesopredator. So, how could a raccoon, an animal that evolved over hundreds of millions of years to adapt itself perfectly to swampy forests, find such runaway success living amid the most destructive and systematically ruthless species ever to exist?

Cities have revealed that raccoons have the power to reset their internal logic and learn the game all over again each time they enter a new urban microhabitat.

Their success lies in co-opting human design. Raccoons, like humans, approach new environments with a mixture of caution and curiosity, reflecting their innate capacity to understand multiple threats and opportunities simultaneously. This effortless multidimensional thinking is linked to two major traits—cognitive flexibility and altered home ranges—that give synanthropic raccoons a unique leg up among the city’s menagerie, and provide tantalizing hints that cities might be changing the way the animals think.

Cognitive flexibility refers to how “plastic” an animal’s thinking can be, or how well it can find new ways to solve problems when confronted with unfamiliar situations or environments. Scientists test animal cognitive flexibility through what’s called a “reversal learning” test. In one recent study by the U.S. government’s National Wildlife Research Center, scientists trained raccoons, skunks, and coyotes in Colorado and Utah to expect a reward (pellets of chicken liver or sausage) if they tapped on one of two glowing buttons stationed at the left or right of a mocked-up food dispenser. The first stage was simple: If the button on the left was pushed, food pellets would drop from a hole. Compared to skunks and coyotes, raccoons were the quickest to discover that tapping the left button would release food, with most of the eight raccoon subjects unlocking the puzzle within one or two attempts. Skunks lagged slightly behind, needing four or so attempts before they got the hang of the new regimen. But coyotes—anxious, clumsy, and scared to try new things—lagged far behind their mesopredator cousins. It took forty-four tries before a lone coyote, named Orion, pressed its paw down on the left button. The other five coyotes simply refused.

This was just the beginning. After weeks of having it drilled into their small brains that tapping the left button equals food, the scientists abruptly shifted the environment. Suddenly not only did tapping on the left button fail to provide food but also it initiated a time-out phase in which the dispenser stopped responding for ten seconds. Getting food now required that the animals unlearn what they had just been taught and go against their newly primed instincts by choosing to tap the other button, on the right. This was when the cognitive flexibility and raw intelligence of raccoons truly shined.

Raccoons were aces at recognizing when their newly acquired skills became useless, and they quickly pivoted—far faster than the skunks or coyotes—to experimenting with new strategies, including hitting the button on the right. This phenomenon is called a “paradigm reversal,” an apt term for the kind of confusion and recovery that raccoons (and sometimes humans) experience in urban spaces every day. And while it’s rare that a raccoon might encounter a food-dispensing button in its nightly travels (probably as rare as a human stumbling across an ATM dispensing free bills), the capacity to take advantage of these kinds of opportunities, even when they mean going against the ostensible safe bet, is a key reason for their near total dominance of cities like Toronto.

The swampy forests that raccoons and their ancestors evolved within for 28 million years couldn’t be more unlike city landscapes. From the perspective of a single raccoon, any patch of forest is a familiar mixture of trees, plants, fungi, ponds, and animals organized into different combinations, with so many variations that it would be impossible to map. One level of magnitude higher, though, and the forest is a monolith. In a healthy forest, each section pretty much resembles any other. Where differences between forest sections emerge—rocky outcrops, ponds, or grassy clearings—they do so gradually. Mud and long grasses signal a water source nearby, while a steepening hill beset with pebbles and stones warns of an adjoining cliff face. Features rarely emerge out of nowhere.

Cities upend this intuitive organization. Any individual, be they raccoon or human, could quickly learn to navigate a single section of an urban environment. Parking lot. Street corner. House basement. Apartment building roof. But one level of magnitude higher, and cities—unlike the monochromatic green of a verdant forest canopy—disassemble into a chaotic and seemingly irrational patchwork of microenvironments. There is no inherent relationship between the vertical cliff face of a Walmart’s exterior walls and the electronics counter, McCafé, displays of fruits and vegetables, and passport photo booth located inside, all illuminated under the blinding wash of fluorescent bulbs held aloft three stories up.

That sheer cliff, in turn, has nothing to do with the area that surrounds it: a clearing of poured concrete and painted yellow lines populated by constantly rolling metal vehicles moving at different speeds in multiple directions alongside human beings making their disordered way in and out of their cars and the building. Extend it farther, and there is no intuitive reason that the parking lot abuts another flattened concrete-covered plain, this one with vehicles moving in two directions at much higher speeds. Beyond the road lie much smaller buildings organized in neat rows made up of a jumble of hard angles—porch steps, open windows, sloping roofs—that seem to spring spontaneously from the ground. Each one of these fragmented microenvironments—Walmart, parking lot, road, residential block—are found side by side. From an ecological perspective, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

There is very little about finding food and shelter inside a Walmart that is translatable to the parking lot outside. Moving from one to the other is the equivalent of finding that the button to the left shuts down the system entirely, leaving you starved. Mastering the laws of the parking lot can’t possibly prepare you for the throttling speed and amoral violence of the road beyond. With cars driving down roads like unpredictable boulders, disobeying the most basic laws of spatial reasoning, the time you have to unlearn the rules of the game is limited if you are to survive. And so it is for the houses beyond, the park beyond them, the skyscrapers, corner stores, restaurants, bars, alleyways, hospitals, schools, and construction sites that lie beyond, beyond, beyond. Mastery of one of these spaces briefly staves off death. But mastering the constant process of learning and unlearning as you move from each to the others—now, that is a radical adaptation, and it’s a rare synanthrope that can manage this feat. Cities have revealed that raccoons have the power to reset their internal logic and learn the game all over again each time they enter a new urban microhabitat, transforming this unremarkable swamp dweller into a model urban thinker. And the strangest part of all? We have no idea how far their minds might go.

____________________________

Excerpted from Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World by Dan Werb. Copyright © 2026 by Dan Werb. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.