The Nature of the Beast

Left photo by Jeffrey Freeman. Right photo by Somewhere In Toronto from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Mystery solved (sort of). According to Nathalie Karvonen, the executive director of the Toronto Wildlife Centre, and Ralph Toninger, senior project manager of restoration services at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, the naked (and rather terrifying looking) creature that’s been seen skulking around Parkdale is indeed a raccoon, and come winter, one that's in grave danger.

Here's what Karvonen told Torontoist:

The shape looks exactly like a raccoon. We get hundreds of raccoons in here a year, and by process of elimination, there’s really not anything else it could be. The face shape, the size, the posture, and the length of the legs, they all look exactly like a raccoon. Opossums are quite a bit different. Their legs are a lot shorter for one thing; they’re low squat creatures and they don’t have the same body shape as a raccoon…even though this raccoon seems to be doing fine now—the body weight and hydration look good—it’s going to die when winter comes. It needs its fur to survive the Canadian winter. I don’t know what’s happened to put it in this condition, but it would definitely need some help.

And here's what Toninger told us:

It’s definitely a raccoon.

My first inclination would be that this is a hairless mutation. It doesn’t look thin, it looks reasonably robust, and it doesn’t look in poor health. It also looks like a lactating female. In one picture it looks like it has teats hanging down, which would imply that it’s healthy enough that it produced young. But it’s hard to say.

A number of parasites—mange is the biggest one—can cause hair loss in animals. I’ve seen many coyotes that are very mange ridden, and they’ll be almost completely bald, but mange is a parasite that affects the skin and causes irritation and itchiness, and the animals actually scratch their hair off. The raccoon's skin looks to be in good shape. There are no obvious blisters or lesions, or anything like that that would indicate it was mange. It may have had mange a long time ago and it healed over—that’s a possibility. Personally, I have never seen a completely naked raccoon. I’ve seen raccoons that have had skin parasites, and have had bad cases of mange and have looked almost like this, but they still usually have little patches of hair where they can’t reach. Even its feet and toes look completely hairless.

There are also some cruel people out there that might grab an animal and do something to it. It wouldn’t be the first time. If it was natural, I don’t know how it would have survived up until now, unless it’s somebody’s weird pet. If it’s outside it would have no chance of survival over the winter.

If you see this poor raccoon, please contact the Toronto Wildlife Centre at (416) 631-0662.