Walking home from the gym today I encountered the holiest of the holiest sights a human being can be a witness to. Now before I go on, I want to remove all possible doubt that I may not be an “animal sympathizer.” I am. But in this case, there is a line, and I’m willing to draw it.

Raccoons. Apparently the pregnant mother roaming the streets surrounding my establishment gave birth. Oh and what a birth it was. Spectacular would almost refuse to accept the true marvel behind this event. Six young’ins. Oh yes. Considering their growth rate, there simply isn’t enough garbage to keep these evil spirits fed, and fed well.

I can deal with immigrant marsupials, but not with homegrown raccoons. These animals are the kingpins of garbage. Literally, they traffic in garbage; consider it the narcotic of the street. A raccoon has reached such a pronounced level of efficiency, that the competition has been relegated to substandard living conditions. Welfare recipients they have become indeed.

Social safety nets aside, I never felt a stronger desire to have a car pass or drive by and somehow, by some accidental miracle, obliterate at least two baby raccoons. The mother looked old and frail, who knows, maybe giving birth was a pain after all. Why two? Why not four, or for that matter, all of them. It all comes down to mechanics. More particularly, a vehicle only has two linear or vector paths of travel. Front wheels go over two, while the back wheels finish off. Given that two is the optimized choice, we can’t ask for more; in fact, we can only hope zero is not the outcome.

Regardless of the aforementioned, zero was the outcome. Verdict? No car drove by. But that was just one scenario, who knows what might happen tomorrow.

By now you must be raging. Animal rights. Right.

Well…Wrong! If you find animals so cute, you should probably let the rats in your basement breed (and they breed like rabbits, awkwardly). Rats are animals, so rats are cute. We can’t discriminate in application; an animal is an animal. Just because a “bigger” animal takes up a bigger volume of space, or you happen to, by coincidence, find their fluffy nature ever so endearing, it does not mean that they are pets of a nuisance free type.

Oh boy. Garbage. As I was saying. Imagine you put the garbage away at night. Now imagine how it is to walk outside in the morning and find yourself a victim of the “Raccoon Garbage Stealth Attack Team” or RGSAT. Efficacy. Opulence. These beings lavish in epicurean delights. The children of “subsidized countries” only find themselves eating such delights in wild extravagant dreams. When will it stop. The hormones we pump in our food, ultimately finds its way to the “city-raccoon.”

This is a pandemic. Epidemic.

Something needs to be done, and I don’t see the end of garbage any time soon. The end of raccoons is also not about to be aggravated to such an extent that the endangered species list would need to be invoked. However, thank god for blogs and meaningless ramblings. Symbol manipulation.

NOTE: This can also be found at http://gentlyused.wordpress.com/2007/04/14/city-scavenger/.