Spent last night babysitting a racoon I called “Zigzagoon the Raccoon” For those that don’t know, zigzagoon is a raccoon like Pokémon. So yeah.
I wasn’t exactly expecting to be a mini animal control last night, but the ladies definitely loved the cuteness of the little guy.
Apparently he snuck into the parking garage late in the day, where he was captured in a box designed specifically for small animals, and brought up to the day staff to figure out what to do. Around this point is when I came in to work.
The residents that brought the box were cool enough that they said they’d bring the racoon to some animal care facility thing at Downsview Park, which was preferable to going to the Toronto Humane society, because apparently baby racoons are “out of season” and they’d just put him down, but I had to look after him all night because these guys wanted to sleep in the meantime. Makes sense, I was going to be awake anyways.
So the little guy was in this cramped box, with some carrots and some maybe meat thing, and I was given a heart shaped dish of milk to give the guy. Of course there was no way that dish was going to fit inside the box, so for almost my first hour at work I was stressing over how to get Milk A into Racoon B.
I first thought I’d be really clever and use SCIENCE! to get the milk in, getting a straw and sort of pipette-ing the milk in. Air pressure, awesome!
But I wasn’t sure which end the racoon was at, didn’t know if he’d go for it, and also I didn’t have any straws. That last one was the big hold up to my plan.
Hoping that this wouldn’t be the one night where someone would not leave a large box in the recycling room unbroken down, I kept an eye on the recycling room camera, and lo and behold some residents were moments away from breaking down and beautifully large box. They actually thought I was going to scold them into breaking it down.
“No, no, can I take it?”
So now I put on some of my rubber gloves, put the racoon box into the much larger box, and let’er out. It worked out perfectly – though a pretty inelegant solution. Need more room? Get a bigger box! (I still wanted to use air pressure for… I don’t know. Something. So unfair.) The little guy had a lot more room, loved the milk (we never thought he’d go through that whole dish, I actually got him a bunch more… maybe a bad idea when he started playing around with the dish and spilling milk on the floor through the box.)
Zigzagoon had a very cute shake he’d sometimes do, I mean in addition to the jitteriness of his being terrified by his environment. Like one of those dog-walks-out-of-a-lake shakes.
This guy peed all over his box, which was fine, but the one time he pooped was MASSIVE. To use an awkward/gross image, it’s pretty much like if someone pooped a baby. So, that gross thing was smelling up the joint, so I had to glove up, get newspaper, and get it trashed. I actually went right to the source, tossing it in the trash compactor. Hmm, I guess I could have dropped it out of the newspaper and into a toilet… I don’t know, that seems risky. What if the thing stuck to the newspaper when I was trying to drop it, and sort of swung towards me? Yeah, no, I made the right call.
Eventually, after it had gotten much later and he was all done with sleeping for a while, Zigzagoon was doing his best to get out of there. You almost wanted to give him a boost, what with how hard he was trying to reach up out of the box. He even started experimenting with using his first little box home as a step up to get out of the big box. Once he managed to knock over that first box, which yielded much firmer ground to work with, it was clear that given enough time this guy could get out. So I gloved up and took out the small box.
I took a couple of pictures of the guy, just with my little camera phone, but I let some other people do the same, but they went all out with flashes. I felt bad for the little guy- I don’t much care for sudden bursts of light in my face, and at least I know they’re coming. What’s worse is that guy probably got more of it than I’ve had to deal with in a long time myself. Pity the cute ones, it seems.
Those nice residents came by at about 5:20am to pick him up, a little earlier than expected, but I had paper work to concentrate on anyways. I gloved up, got him back in his little box (interrupting his renewed interest in the maybe meat thing) and off he went.
Leaving me to ditch the milk leaking box.
Please just be the milk.
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