AHG Seminar - 15 April: Urban Exploiters

Urban Exploiters: A More-Than Animal Analysis of Racoon Interventions in Urban Canadian Spaces

Mady Rodrigues-Raby

Raccoons have been leaving their five-fingered pawprints all over Canadian urban spaces for centuries. Raccoon histories intersect with a wide range of topics including pet-keeping, animal psychology, medicine, environmental conservation and urbanization. This paper examines the multi-faceted identities that raccoons took on, or were assigned by humans, in early 20th century Canada. Raccoons’ encroachment into human areas was often perceived to be malevolent due to their growing association with human traits. This same association enabled raccoons to transcend their existence as object-body. Their survival skills garnered the attention of animal behaviourists, who wrote extensively about their superior intelligence, reinforcing ideas about raccoons’ biological closeness to humans. Raccoons bodies were also critically interpreted by intellectuals – how they used their sense of touch to explore their world differentiated them from the rest of the animal kingdom. Finally, the practice of raccoon pet-keeping blurred lines between wild animal and companion animal. This paper argues that raccoon behaviours transgressed their prescribed role in settler-colonial Canada and unsettled Western orderings of the natural world. Raccoon interventions in Toronto and other urban areas defied expectations as animals of a ‘lower order,’ resulting in them taking on an entirely new identity as intelligent, more-than-animal beings.