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Welcome to Toronto, World Capital of the Urban Raccoon

Dan Werb on the Understated Intelligence of the Animals That Share Our Cities

Via Crown

Dan Werb

July 15, 2026

If you ask anybody in Toronto, they’ll tell you that raccoons, AKA the Procyon lotor (Latin for “before-dog washer,” given their apparent penchant for washing their food), are everywhere. The creatures have turned even the most gray urban spaces into wild landscapes, which have come to suit them far better than their original woodland home. There is no part of the city that they can’t master—or at least that’s what people here believe.<br>Article continues after advertisement

I want to test that theory by going to the most urban, concrete, and dead place I can think of to see if I can catch a glimpse. To my mind that’s Union Station, the epicenter of the city’s rail and transit system and the doorway into its sprawling and grid-like downtown district. If I see raccoon traces there, I figure, it will be pretty good evidence that these creatures have unlocked even the least accommodating micro-habitat across this massive metropolis. So I take the subway during rush hour, just as a raccoon did a few days earlier (after which it was praised for being so well-behaved), and emerge amid a crush of human bodies.

Union Station is surrounded by concrete sidewalks, made glossy by old flattened gum, which are in turn ringed by downtown streets filled with snarled and unmoving traffic spewing clouds of choking exhaust. All around, gleaming with an incandescence that seems cut out of the cold blue sky itself, sheer cliffs rise impossibly high, a canopy of skyscrapers reflecting sunlight among themselves, creating a labyrinth that partitions the sun’s rays.

If New York City has 8 million stories, Toronto has just as many—but they’re all about some crazy raccoon.

At the epicenter of this hyper-urban space, I walk through Union Station’s broad galleries, taking stock of the throngs of human experience passing through. At one point, the light shifts to a warm buttery glow, and I look up at frosted skylights etched with a branching mosaic of semicircular blobs surrounded by droplets that spread out and overlap across the panes in a crude motif. There’s something about the pattern that causes me to pull away from the stream of humans and set my back against the wall. The blobs and droplets appear randomly placed at first glance but seem to have an internal order the longer you stare. It’s a surprisingly organic, aesthetic choice for a space that is otherwise made up of straight lines and antiseptic materials. I like it. I follow the rough etched lines across the opaque glass to the corner of one of the skylight panes, where a single semicircular blob and set of droplets—five in all, I see now—are etched apart from the others. And it’s then that I realize what it is I’m looking at.

This isn’t a pattern etched on glass. Instead, it’s a layer of dirt and grime built up over seasons, with prints made by the press of raccoon paws. The semicircular blobs are from the carnivoran’s metacarpal pads; five digits extend out, short like a dog’s paws but spread wide like human fingers. I’m floored. While a nonstop parade of human beings moves through this space every day, raccoons numbering in the hundreds are moving back and forth among this static urban architecture above us. Here, in a patch of the city that is 99 percent concrete, a space that leaves no quarter for animals to survive, is evidence that the creatures are thriving, albeit just out of reach.

I circle the station many times, then move surreptitiously through the buildings across the street to catch glimpses of the community liv-ing on the roof. But no such luck. Later, I head over to a friend’s third-floor apartment, only to hear that I just missed an epic battle between their cat (Kenneth) and the slow-moving resident raccoon that lives at the top of the fire escape. It’s as if raccoons only exist in my peripheral vision. Like distant stars, once you try to look at them straight on, they...