By Ava Barcelona
In the 1970s, I was driving around Wisconsin and came across a farm where they were raising baby raccoons in cages for the pelt.
After weeks of sleepless nights, I returned to buy one to save, and I adopted many more over the next 35 years.
Cooney, one of my adopted raccoons led me to the world of naturalist Henry Beston and his masterpiece, “The Outermost House,” published in 1928. A paragraph in Chapter 2 set the tone. Beston wrote:
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
[The book can be read free of charge at this website: https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/73328/pg73328-images.html#Chapter_I ]
After reading this paragraph, I couldn’t imagine living the rest of my life without the knowledge of what I’ve learned from these lines.
I no longer could accept people’s narrow-minded description of raccoons as “trouble makers, a nuisance.” The raccoons lived in my arms, on top of my head, for 35 years. I knew their DNA! Their intellect dictates that they boomerang the mistreatment, injustice back to the sender.
Cooney was 15 when Noelle, 9 years old, had kidney failure. I had her euthanized. When I returned home, the accusatory look in Cooney’s eyes was horrifying. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? The next 47 days were indescribable. She curled up in Noelle’s bed and “tuned me out” in the most brutal way. She looked through me, no acknowledgement of my existence. She did the absolute minimum of getting up to eat. On the 48th day, she came up to me, intense eye contact, “OK mom, I’m ready to move on.” Forty-seven days of pure agony I couldn’t quell, it had to be on her terms!
Cooney fell in love with a garden statue. You could not force, teach, bribe a pose like this. It comes from a beautiful heart, mirroring my emotional investment in them.
Artists have captured the beauty of wildlife since time immemorial. It is far more challenging to capture EMOTIONS. That is what Cooney offers in this photo, the beautiful side of a raccoon.
Ava Barcelona asks, “How can society tolerate ‘coon’ hunting?”
AVA BARCELONA is a longtime Wildlife Watch member who has rescued and nurtured both wild and domestic animals.