Ten years ago, a dead raccoon on a downtown Toronto street sparked an impromptu sidewalk shrine as passersby laid flowers, candles and cigarettes around the critter.<\/p>\n
Now, Conrad the raccoon has been immortalized in the city’s history with a heritage plaque at the spot where it all happened.<\/p>\n
Conrad went viral in 2015 after his remains laid on the sidewalk at the corner of Yonge and Church streets for nearly 14 hours following a social media post reporting the dead animal to the city.<\/p>\n
Meg Sutton, plaques co-ordinator with Heritage Toronto, says the 10th anniversary of Conrad’s death is the perfect occasion to revive the raccoon’s story, which she says united Canadians across the country.<\/p>\n
The plaque includes photos of the posts that launched the DeadRaccoonTO hashtag, imprints of raccoon paws and a QR code that leads to a website where people can post their own raccoon stories.<\/p>\n
As the first-ever animal plaque in the city, Sutton says it also serves to highlight the natural history of raccoons in urban spaces.<\/p>\n
In the early 1900s, industrialization and deforestation caused such a threat to the raccoon population that people worried the creatures would go extinct, she said.<\/p>\n
“Now, raccoons have become so adaptable and resilient that they’ve made their homes in attics and sheds, they’ve found new diet sources and human-discarded food, and they’ve just become these cheeky personalities that run amok,” Sutton said Tuesday in an interview.<\/p>\n
So far, more than 400 people have scanned the QR code on Conrad’s plaque and the web page has been visited more than 1,000 times.<\/p>\n
After a month, a permanent version of the plaque will be installed to replace the QR code with life-size raccoon prints since the QR code requires maintenance and upkeep, Sutton said.<\/p>\n
Promoting community engagement was the main goal of the plaque, she said, since “everyone has a raccoon story in Toronto.”<\/p>\n
“Conrad is one for the people, where he represents a lot of individual moments or interactions,” Sutton said. “And I think we all kind of fell in love with him.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ten years ago, a dead raccoon on a downtown Toronto street sparked an impromptu sidewalk shrine as passersby…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-16534","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}