Brooklyn Animal Lovers Too Nice to Curb Raccoon Invasion

Photo by Tambako The Jaguar

CARROLL GARDENS, BROOKLYN — A nearly 3,000-word investigation in the New York Times last week revealed the true reason why Brooklyn’s destructive gangs of street raccoons just seem to go on multiplying, unabated, despite city legislation dictating they be killed once trapped: The borough’s homeowners and trappers ”don’t have the heart to do what is legally required.”

According to Times reporter Annie Correal, ”many of the trappers who were interviewed expressed misgivings about exterminating healthy raccoons — displaying an empathy they did not feel for, say, roaches or bedbugs.”

Correal watches as “Don,” a local trapper who does not wish to be identified, so liberal are his raccoon removal policies, sets a cage down in a wooded area outside Brooklyn, slides open its back door and coaxes the animal inside — whom he has named “Rocky” — to run on down the trail.

“You can’t stay in there forever, buddy,” Don murmurs.

Raccoons released into the wild often find their way back to urban areas, the Times reports, because that’s the environment in which they’ve learned to survive.

So now, because no one in Brownstone Brooklyn has the heart to put these bandits down (besides an elusive character in the Times story named Chaim Silver who says he kills raccoons using his own “carbon-dioxide chamber”), they’re ramping up their assault on front yards, back yards, roofs, chimneys and even wall cavities in areas like Carroll Gardens and Park Slope.

Our man “Don” does, at least, appear to be aware that Brooklyn’s coon trappers of yesteryear are rolling in their graves.

“It used to be a little different,” he told Correal. “I am in this for three generations. I go back to the time of the drowning barrel. Guys who trapped animals used to have a 55-gallon drum, and you’d just upend the cage and dump it into the barrel.”

NYC’s 311 help line received more than 1,500 calls about raccoons in 2015, up from 936 in 2014, according to the Times.

City Councilman Brad Lander, of Park Slope, has a bill pending that would create a ”wildlife management advisory board” to discuss issues of urban-pest abatement. However, that bill was created as a reaction to the great goose-culling incident of 2010 — aka, in the exact spirit that’s allowing raccoons to thrive.

A professor of biology tells the Times that elected officials wouldn’t dare craft legislation suggesting raccoons be killed, for fear they’d come into the cross-hairs of the strong — and loud — animal-rights lobby.

“No one wants to tackle it,” the professor said. “It’s on the level of feral cats.”

And so — in the absence of more Chaim Silvers among the bleeding hearts — gangs of wild street raccoons continue ”wilding” and throwing ”frat parties,” as one Park Slope resident puts it, among the multimillion-dollar lots of Brooklyn’s soft gentry.