Whether we like it or not, there is actually good reason to believe that the raccoons are here for good. But that doesn’t mean there’s absolutely nothing to do.
“The raccoon has existed in North America for a very long time, so it is a very well-established species here,” says Nicki Fleming, a zoologist at the Ecomuseum de Montréal. And the raccoon also adapts very, very well to urban environments. It is an omnivore that can hide in natural shelters such as buildings, so in my opinion it is not possible to get rid of it completely.
“It is a species that is very present in cities,” she continues. I recently spoke to someone who works for an extermination company and he told me that in Montreal we’re talking about 25 raccoons per km².
“So this represents a range of individuals across the island [entre 10 et 15 000, si on applique cette densité à la superficie de Montréal] This is too big for it to be realistic to eliminate them all. »
This number could even be much higher. A study published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology in the late 1990s found around five times as many raccoons around Rock Creek Urban Park in Washington, at 125/km² – with peaks of over 300/km² in certain sectors.
There is currently no way to kill or capture raccoons on a large scale: they have to be captured individually, which makes their eradication in cities virtually unthinkable given their numbers.
And that’s without taking into account the fact that even if we managed to eliminate all raccoons from an area or even an entire city, the place would most likely quickly be repopulated and everything would have to start all over again.
Cities are particularly “welcome” places for this species, even more so than the forest or the countryside, considering various indicators such as population density, reproductive success, survival rates, etc.
There’s plenty to eat…
For example, a 2003 study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management tracked raccoon populations living in the city (Chicago), the suburbs, and the countryside (northeastern Illinois) for three years. Densities were consistently much higher in the city and suburbs (approx. 50 juveniles/km²) than in the countryside (5 to 10/km²).
Urban and suburban pups faced significantly fewer predators, which improved their chances of survival, but they also clearly had access to more resources and food, which increased reproductive success. On average, each adult female that gave birth to young had about three offspring in the city and suburbs, while in the countryside it was closer to 1.5.
Furthermore, it has been observed in other work that juveniles typically lose about 50% of their body mass in the winter “in the wild,” while young animals living in cities lose only about 15% because they can easily find food there. Obviously, urbanized environments are very, very favorable to raccoons – much more so than rural or forested areas, as surprising as that may seem.
In fact, the studies cited above found that the primary cause of mass urban juvenile mortality is the risk of epidemics associated with population density. But the cities are so conducive to them that even severe demographic losses are quickly made up for later.
So what to do? “There are exterminators who catch them and euthanize them,” Ms. Fleming says. Others will take them somewhere else, but that is not much more ethical, because the raccoon arrives in a place that it does not know, it does not know where shelter and food are, and the territory is already occupied by other animals that defend it become It. So most of the relocated animals will die. »
The best thing to do, Fleming says, is to adapt to their presence. And that means avoiding anything that might help them maintain or increase their population. This could be, for example, prohibiting access to the space under a shed or ensuring that no food is left accessible.
But there’s not much that can be done – at least nothing that would have a lasting impact at the population level.
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