Ten years ago, a dead\u00a0raccoon\u00a0on a downtown Toronto street sparked an impromptu sidewalk shrine as passersby laid flowers, candles and cigarettes around the critter.<\/p>\n
Now, Conrad the\u00a0raccoon\u00a0has been immortalized in the city\u2019s history with a heritage plaque at the spot where it all happened.\u00a0<\/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\u2019s death is the perfect occasion to revive the raccoon\u2019s 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\u00a0raccoon\u00a0paws and a QR code that leads to a website where people can post their own\u00a0raccoon\u00a0stories.<\/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\u00a0raccoon\u00a0population that people worried the creatures would go extinct, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, raccoons have become so adaptable and resilient that they\u2019ve made their homes in attics and sheds, they\u2019ve found new diet sources and human-discarded food, and they\u2019ve just become these cheeky personalities that run amok,\u201d Sutton said Tuesday in an interview.<\/p>\n
So far, more than 400 people have scanned the QR code on Conrad\u2019s plaque and the web page has been visited more than 1,000 times.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After a month, a permanent version of the plaque will be installed to replace the QR code with life-size\u00a0raccoon\u00a0prints 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 \u201ceveryone has a\u00a0raccoon\u00a0story in Toronto.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cConrad is one for the people, where he represents a lot of individual moments or interactions,\u201d Sutton said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I think we all kind of fell in love with him.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ten years ago, a dead\u00a0raccoon\u00a0on a downtown Toronto street sparked an impromptu sidewalk shrine as passersby laid flowers,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-17282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17282","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=17282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}