The Toronto Star's Linda Diebel says a kind word or two about the masked garbage bandits.

An excerpt:

Ron Brooks is the last person one would expect to like raccoons. His passion is turtles and the Procyon lotor is a turtle's worst nightmare. Raccoons kill and eat turtles, smashing their shells open on rocks with their agile and furless fingers. But his work as one of Canada's leading herpetologists has put him in a position to observe raccoons for more than 30 years and, just as enemies often develop a grudging respect for each other, he has come to admire them.

On a recent afternoon, Brooks, a zoology professor at the University of Guelph, was on the line from a pay phone somewhere in Algonquin Provincial Park, where he was teaching an ecological field course. He began by saying that raccoons are a major problem for turtles. Soon though, he was extolling the marvels of the ring-tailed mammals with the distinctive black mask, pointy noses and stumpy bodies.

He talked about their incredible hands, how they can feel things underwater and how they wash their food for reasons still not fully understood by science. They use fingers which have a thousand times more nerve endings than the human hand to groom themselves, just as primates do. "They are adaptive and highly intelligent and learn so quickly," he said, his voice growing rich with enthusiasm over the crackling long-distance line. "They have such interesting personalities."

So here's my point: if turtle-loving Professor Brooks can bring himself to like raccoons, couldn't Torontonians do the same? There is so much vitriol aimed at raccoons and, while one can understand the frustration over garbage-strewn lawns and chewed-up gardens, I have to wonder if we aren't too hard on them. This is a flat-out defence of the poor, maligned and, yes, misunderstood raccoon.