I live in Brookline, MA (Cleveland Circle), and I was a bit surprised as I walked to the corner store: a raccoon trotted across the street slowly and walked behind a parked car. I didn’t think too much of it, but on my walk back about ten minutes later, I almost ran into the critter sitting on the sidewalk. He glanced at me, a bit startled, but didn’t move an inch (I was about seven to ten feet away). I crossed the street to avoid him, and he just sat there. My building is on a fairly quiet street, but there is a fair amount of foot traffic / car traffic, and I’ve never seen a raccoon walking around in the early evening like that. My first thought (from years of TV and movie [Old Yeller] conditioning, I’m sure) was that the raccoon might have rabies, as his behavior was strange and it is so early in the evening for a nocturnal animal to be out and about (7pm). Should I call the police / animal rescue / someone else, or will I just get ignored? Cheers.
If you’re wrong and one raccoon is unnecessarily euthanized, well, it’s not like they are an endangered species. If your suspicions are correct, and if the animal control/police/whatever can find and dispatch the beastie, you will have saved both it and possibly other animals and humans a heap of misery. Under no circumstances should you approach it.
Another possibility is the animal is semi-tame because someone has been feeding it. Either way it is probably best for the racoon’s sake he get taken off the street. I would call either the Brookline police or a Problem Animal Control agent I found on this page:
I had a similar experience about 9 years ago. We came home for an outing and saw a raccoon hanging around the trashcan about 5 yards from our backdoor in broad daylight. He also looked like he was slobbering, so I feared rabies. I called Animal Control. Since it was a Saturday, the Animal Control call got automatically routed to the police, and they couldn’t do much about it. We called our vet, and got routed to the vet who was covering for them on Saturday. They told us that it could have either rabies or distemper, and gave us a State animal control office to call. The guys there weren’t terribly helpful, either. The guy told us “Well, unless you live in a municipality, I would just shoot it.” Well, we DID live in a municipality, so discharging a firearm could have gotten us arrested, and we didn’t have a gun anyway.
After a few hours, he disappeared, never to show up again. Following the advice of the vet, we washed down the area around the trashcans where he had been hanging around with a clorox solution.