Rowdy Raccoon Roundup

From all across the continent, raccoons acting like hooligans:

-In the Bronx,  a pack of raccoons are terrorizing people at a train station, from jumping out of trees unexpectedly to ominously pacing the station platform, resulting in the most bemusing sentence of news reporting in today's batch of stories:

The mammal is very intelligent and will eat garbage.

Right, because that's an intelligent thing to do.

Elsewhere in the city a while ago, a woman was mugged by raccoons in Central Park :

Takara Larson, 26, of Bedford-Stuyvesant says she was scratched and bitten by a pair of raccoons that “appeared to be on drugs.”

“They were both on me. One was licking my leg and the other one sank his teeth in my other leg,” Larson told the Daily News Thursday. “It just seemed like they were hungry or deranged.”

 -In a Virginia suburb of Washington DC, raccoons are attacking people on their own property:

"Out of the corner of my eye I saw a raccoon. He walked up to me quickly and as I’m stepping away from it … he starts mauling my ankle.”

Alboum had been playing on her porch with her 4-year-old daughter at the time of the attack. After she was bitten she was taken to the hospital and received nine shots for rabies.

Another woman, who was pregnant, was also attacked in a separate incident. She was also treated for rabies.

And of course we've got our usual alleged animals experts who don't know whose side they are on:

However since the raccoons were not found and tested, animal control experts could not say if they had contracted rabies or another potentially dangerous disease.

“Innocent until proven guilty, we say,” Deputy Animal Control Officer Kimberly Corcoran told WJLA-TV of the possible rabid raccoons.

-Finally, in one neighborhood terrorized by raccoons in British Columbia, one man has been attacked four times, and now carries bear spray when he walks his dog. But again, a local government official shifts the blame:

"I understand people's concerns, but it's also a people-driven problem."

This official claims the problem should be blamed on people who are feeding them. But as far as this blog is concerned, this often-heard reasoning is faulty. If people are feeding you, animals, shouldn't that make you be nice to them?