Racoon Trouble

Soon after he became a raccoon trapper, Musa Ramada began having nightmares, waking with the sensation that one of the animals was on his chest. Again and again this happened, upsetting him more and more; eventually he told his boss, an old tough guy named Steve. Steve knew these dreams well and offered advice for escaping them: when you trap a raccoon and its babies, release them together, he said. Ramada started doing so religiously, even when it cost him time and money. His sleep has been undisturbed by raccoons ever since.

No longer consigned to the urban edge, raccoons have infiltrated New York City, occupying homes and generating steady business for people who catch them. The past five years has seen a rise in raccoon trouble—subway lines shut down, brownstones vandalized—that has become even more noticeable during the pandemic, with New Yorkers holed up indoors. Raccoons have been spotted in the West Village, on the Upper East Side, in groups of more than twenty (the collective noun is a “gaze”) among the trees of Prospect Park. In 2016, the New York Times ran a feature headlined “Raccoons Invade Brooklyn,” with tales of backyard chickens being mauled and baby raccoons, known as kits, tumbling from apartment roofs. When a tourist inquired on Reddit about where one might encounter raccoons in the city, someone responded: “Come to Queens! They’re everywhere! Just had to throw one out of my bathtub.” (...)

A Syrian immigrant in his 40s, Ramada moved to New York in the 1990s to study computer science but dropped out when he couldn’t afford tuition. Since then, he’s passed through a series of marginal jobs, from construction and fixing cars to being a cook in an Italian restaurant. About four years ago he became a trapper entirely by accident, after responding to an online advertisement that he believed was related to house painting. At the interview, Steve, the boss, asked Ramada if he knew how to climb a ladder. “I said sure,” Ramada told me. “He said, high ladder—like 40 feet.” When Ramada found out he’d be catching raccoons, he was taken aback; that Americans would pay you to remove wild animals from their houses was something he’d never imagined. Back home, he said, this would be the duty of young men—a son or a cousin looking to demonstrate his bravery. But home was here now, in this city of money and exclusion that creates its own forms of opportunity. “Sure,” he told Steve, rolling the r, and just like that he was hired.

Ramada is in his forties, with grey stubble, scruffy hair, and tobacco-stained teeth. He rolls stubby joints of cheap pot purchased from a contact in the Bronx and cruises around, lightly stoned, with his traps and the junk that fills his panel van: tools for keeping the engine going; scraps of paper with the scribbled addresses of his customers (which he otherwise forgets); husks of sunflower seeds (he says he’s addicted); and books by Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate who published 34 novels and more than 350 short stories, nearly all of which Ramada says he has read.

I first met him in November 2019, soon after he stopped working for Steve and started his own trapping company. I had been calling raccoon trappers for days, but most of them declined to speak to me; even Steve had fobbed me off, claiming that his bosses were “at their holiday house upstate.” (It was only later, when I met Ramada, that I began piecing the story together: Steve is one of the biggest trappers in New York, and emphatically has no boss.) Another trapper spoke to me on background for 45 minutes and made me promise not to refer to a word of our conversation. Others put the phone down when they heard the word “journalist.” But Ramada, when I reached him, acted as if he’d been waiting for me to call. His accent was very different from those of the gruff New Yorkers I’d been dealing with. First, with conviction, he told me he could communicate with raccoons. Then he asked me if I could help him design a website.

He’d spent hours trying to find customers, printing business cards and creating listings on Google Maps, but his rivals were far ahead of him, often operating multiple businesses, each with their own phone numbers. (I had discovered this on my earlier calls when the deep background man listened to me for a minute and then said, “I already explained this to you, pal.”) So Ramada tried another strategy: undercutting the competition. Initially he charged $600 to remove up to five raccoons—“that’s like a family,” he said—no matter the number of return visits; this was about a third of the going rate. Slowly, business picked up until he was averaging a raccoon a week. He abandoned the idea of a website.

“Best job I ever had,” he told me, splitting open one sunflower seed and then another. Ramada traverses the five boroughs in his van, laying traps in attics and basements; sometimes a raccoon falls through a ceiling and he must chase after it with a sack and noose. He is always on call but seldom busy, and in between jobs he cooks, walks his dog, watches Syrian news on YouTube, or— when he has the money—plays golf; sometimes a customer calls mid-round and he has to leave to deal with a raccoon. He lives in Queens with his wife, who is Italian American, and her young son, who, according to Ramada, is fond of raccoons. This is not surprising, given Ramada’s own rich and unusual affection for them.

* * *

On the internet, there is an outpouring of love for raccoons, with Instagram accounts like @cutest.raccoons and @raccoonfeeds amassing hundreds of thousands of followers. Clips of pet raccoons (#trashpandas) rolling on giant hamster wheels, falling off furniture, and skirmishing with cats rack up hundreds of thousands of likes and shares. Influencer raccoon accounts come replete with merchandise and sponsored content; one of the most successful, an unusually pale raccoon named Uni, who lives in Taiwan, has been featured on BuzzFeed and People.com.

This online adoration is at stark odds with reality, where, for the most part, we treat raccoons as pests. And not without reason: They are destructive visitors, ripping through drywall, gnawing pipes, robbing food, making noises (“whissing,” as Ramada puts it), and leaving droppings that carry a parasite which causes nausea and sometimes blindness. To deter raccoons, you can buy ultrasonic noise machines, wall spikes, and heat-activated sprinklers. You can buy urine (“100 percent pure”) from coyotes held in cages. An animal welfare activist I spoke to abhors such tactics and recommended, instead, blasting “hard rock music” in the attic. When I asked if this ever became irritating, she said: “It doesn’t bother me as much as having a raccoon gassed would bother me.” (...)

It is Ramada’s job to clean up after raccoons and thwart their attempts at havoc—the leaks and ruined ceilings and foul, crusted dens. Unlike some of his rivals, though, he refuses to blame the animals. “They been here in America before us,” he said. “That’s why they’re invading our home, just like we invade theirs.”

He has come to believe, too, that he is able to communicate with them, just as one might communicate with a dog. “They live in the house, so they understand our language,” he said. “So many times the raccoon can see us and we cannot see it. It’s in the trees and houses, just listening.”

And so a raccoon might hear a man speaking tenderly to his wife or children, Ramada said.

“So when I say to them I love you, they understand that.”

by Kimon de Greef, Guernica | Read more:

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