99% Invisible - Raccoon Thanksgiving

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

After Toronto unveiled its "raccoon-resistant" compost bins in 2016, some people feared the animals would be starved, but many more celebrated the innovative design. Rolling out this novel locked bin opened a new battlefront in city's ongoing "war on raccoons."Journalist Amy Dempsey was researching the bins and raccoon behavior when her reporting took an unexpected turn down her own garbage-strewn alleyway. Had local raccoons finally figured out how to defeat the greatest human effort in our “war” against their kind?This episode original aired in 2018.Raccoon Resistance Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Every November, Americans gather together to celebrate important traditions. Shopping for doorbuster deals on 72-inch TVs, watching Snoopy Balloons float down 6th Avenue, and we eat a lot of food. Lots of food means lots of food waste. And so, after your Thanksgiving, you might find yourself hosting an unwanted second gathering. Raccoons rummaging in your garbage for discarded turkey and uneaten yams. Today we're presenting a remixed all-time favorite story we ran for Thanksgiving 2018. It's about our friendly neighbors up north and their attempt to defend themselves from an invading army of trash pandas.

Enjoy. The City of Toronto has a special relationship with raccoons, or at least they think they do. 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. This is Amy Dempsey, a reporter for the Toronto Star.

Do we have more raccoons than, say, Chicago or Vancouver? Well, we don't actually know. You can't count urban raccoons. They Chicago or Vancouver? Well, we don't actually know. You can't count urban raccoons, they're all over the place. But who needs data when you can feel it in your heart? A few years ago when a raccoon died on Yonge 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 gonna have an identity crisis. But Toronto's feelings about raccoons are not uncomplicated. 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. Maybe worse than all this though, was the raccoons' 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. 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, s***.

And then maybe you'd argue with your spouse or roommates about who'd have to clean it up. The green bins become a feast, a veritable feast for the raccoons. 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. 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.

The war on raccoons sort of started with Mayor John Tory. 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. He said things like... We are ready, we are armed, we are motivated. We have left no stone unturned in our fight against Raccoon Nation. 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 and hammed it up with reporters as cameras flashed. No David. Hahaha. 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, you know, defeat is not an option. 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. 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 Rare Rig Pacific. I'm Dennis Monastir with Rare Rig Pacific and I serve as the environmental sales manager for Canada. 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. I mean Rareig Pacific takes new product development very, very seriously. And there's a five pronged approach, which we initiate. 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.

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. Rarick 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. So we had to ensure that the lock itself disengages 100% of the time. The container must function in extreme weather conditions. Ergonomics, easily open with one single hand. We were looking at, you know, 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. Elimination of

internal catch points. Any material that becomes trapped inside the container could pose significant risk with respect to the IC factor for the residents. But on top of the IC factor and the meddling kids, Rarik Pacific had to think about enemy number one, the raccoons. Eric Pacific had to think about enemy number one, the raccoons. Yeah, so we worked with an urban raccoon specialist to basically understand, um, raccoons likes, dislikes, their dexterity, what they can and cannot do.

It was a local raccoon specialist by the name of Suzanne McDonald. I'm Dr. Suzanne McDonald. I'm a professor at York university. I study animal behavior. I'm calling her a McDonald. I'm a professor at York University. I study animal behavior. I'm calling her a raccoon specialist, really downplays her accomplishments. She is a professor of biology and psychology who has studied just about every animal you can think of. She may have studied every animal you can think of,

but in Toronto, there's only one animal that matters. In Toronto, everybody talks about raccoons. I work in Vancouver a lot and nobody talks about raccoons there. There's raccoons all the time. So she wasn't that surprised when Rarik Pacific got in touch as they were designing their bin. 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. You go away? You're in my yard. 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. If you would look at a monkey in the face, they'll look away. But raccoons don't. They look right at us. They look right through us.

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. Rarick Pacific took all of this information and applied it to their bin design. There was multiple iterations of the design.

There's multiple photorealistic renderings. 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. We felt very, very confident with the success of that locking mechanism and the container itself. 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? But eventually, Amy did get a bin of her own 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. And contrary to popular belief, raccoons don't have opposable thumbs, even though they can

move the thumb-like 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. 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.

As any intrepid reporter would do, Amy decided to look into it. 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, yeah, they're probably hiding from the cold. But she said 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? 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. 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. 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, 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, you know, 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. There is no such thing as a raccoon-proof green bin. Toronto spent a lot of money on the raccoon-proof green bins. And this was video that was put out yesterday. So I come out. Then about a week later, this story comes out. And so look to your left. So watch as they'll zoom into it here.

Hold on. It's basically a local Toronto resident who has filmed a video of a raccoon opening his green bin. Yeah, let's give that a little tug. There we go. Something smells good. And just like kind of's give that a little tug. — There we go. — Well, something smells good. — And just, like, kind of winking at the camera almost.

— Really? — Ha ha ha ha ha. — 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 Rarig, Pacific. — For somebody just to come out and say, oh, the container doesn't work, um, you know, is frustrating.

The videos Dennis says don't tell the whole story. A couple of break-ins doesn't mean the design is flawed. The screw might be loosened too much. And if you just simply tighten it a little bit, it might prevent the issue. 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. I don't know, for some reason, you know, Toronto specifically, they love to glamorize raccoons. The city for its part, blamed the handful of break-ins on user error. 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. The suggestion being that if Joe in Yorkville had a problem with his bin, 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, you know, what the hell can the raccoons get into the green bins now? At this point, Amy had been convinced by the city's argument. There was no problem with the bins. The problem was the users. 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. But Amy didn't get to stay smug for long. Two nights later, her own bin was plundered. 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 like seven times.

It seemed the reporter had just become a character in her own story. I'm thinking like first of all, do they, like this is so weird. Do they know that I was looking into this stuff? You know, am I being targeted? 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. And they replaced the lid on my bin as a precaution,

even though they couldn't find anything wrong with it. She also wrote to the Raccoon expert, Suzanne McDonald, who was thrilled because she's always secretly been on Team Raccoon. 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, 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 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 shot here. This one is going to go viral. Camera is pointing at the bins and then all of a sudden this this mama raccoon comes skulking out and she just pulls the bin down like and she she gets out of the way like at this point you can tell she knows what she's doing like she's not gonna stand in the way and get crushed by the bin. No. She's gonna pull it at the exact right angle and it just falls down with like a BAM! And turns around and looks at the camera as if to say, watch this.

And then she turns the handle and just opens it, yoink, opens it just like I would. And in they go. The keys seem to be knocking down the bin, which made the handle much easier to turn. When it's on the ground, you can just kind of pull on it, like as if you're pulling a lever. You know, you can almost bat your paws at it or like pull it to the side. 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 handily 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 they were getting relatively few complaints overall. When Amy told Dennis Montesier from Rarik Pacific that the raccoons were getting into the bin that his company designed, he decided to pay her a house call.

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. Some heroes don't wear capes. They wear polo shirts with the company logo on the breast pocket. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Raccoons don't teach each other these things. It'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. 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. We call her the genius raccoon because I think it's amazing that she did it.

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. Our raccoons are not starving to death, that's for sure. 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's 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. After the break, more Raccoon Hijinks with Kirk Kolstad. 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.

Oh yeah, instantly. You know, the local news is there covering the story, on the scene, in Minnesota. But I'm out here, you know, 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. And so if you want like 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. 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. Which is not the most traditional Thanksgiving meal. No, 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. So the president getting sent a raccoon wasn't maybe not that odd, but him keeping him as a pet was out of the ordinary. 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, you know, as gifts, often from, you know, foreign dignitaries

who knew that the Coolidge's were really into weird animals. But I'm still having a hard time picturing, like, a pygmy hippo running around the White House. Right. Well, some of them they, you know, re-gifted to zoos that could actually take care of them. But the Coolages 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.

And so what about Rebecca, the raccoon? 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. That sounds like a pretty good pet. 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 you know chewing her way out of her

Enclosures and she'd wriggle out 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 and Yeah, so she was a bit of a handful too But you know 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 So she's a little bit of a hassle, but she seemed to have a pretty sweet life Rebecca the raccoon Yeah, she did and she lived with the Coolidge's 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 Kelvin 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, quote, 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. Wow. All right. Thank you, Kurt.

Oh, yeah, of course. That episode originally aired in 2018, and as of this airing, Toronto has yet to declare victory in the war on raccoons. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Mingle based on Amy Dempsey's epic raccoon story from the Toronto Star. You should really read the whole thing. It's great. We'll have a link on the website.

Original tech production by Sharif Youssef. Remix by Martine Gonzalez. Music by Swan Riel. This episode is dedicated to our digital director Kirk Holstead who enjoys nothing better than to be placed in a bathtub with a little water in it and given a cake of soap with which to play. Cathy Tu is our executive producer. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Taylor Shedrick is our intern. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Ley, Lash Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime,

Nina Potok, Jaka Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful. Uptown. Oakland, California. You can find us on our Discord server and also we just joined Blue Sky. I don't know.

We're going to give it a shot. Let's just try to make it good, okay? You can find us on our Discord server and also, we just joined Blue Sky, I don't know. We're gonna give it a shot. Let's just try to make it good, okay? You can find links to those social media sites plus some great pictures of the First Lady Grace Coolidge and her raccoon friend Rebecca, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.