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My morning commute with the Toronto subway raccoon
Toronto
EVAN ANNETT

This article was published more than 8 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

By 6:30 a.m., the streetcar platform at Spadina station is only just stirring to life. There's usually a small crowd waiting with me to catch the 510, my usual ride to work every morning. Today the crowd was a bit bigger, a bit livelier – and furrier. But none of us expected our fellow commuter would get so Internet-famous.

On social media: Watch Toronto’s subway raccoon in action

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We were lined up for the streetcar when a faint commotion came up behind us: a TTC worker with a broom, trying to drive away a raccoon that had somehow found its way onto the streetcar platform. Like other Annex raccoons I've seen in my years living in the neighbourhood, this one was fearless – it wasn't hissing or fighting back, but it was standing its ground. In my morning fatigue I fumbled to get my phone and take a picture of the intruder, but by then the broom-wielding worker had repelled it down the stairs to the eastbound Bloor-Danforth platform.

The worker had few options to drive the raccoon up and out of the station, back into the open air; down was the safer course. But what would it do down there? Hitch a ride on the subway?

Later that morning, commuters were startled when a raccoon tried to board a southbound subway. TTC spokesman Brad Ross said it was first spotted at about 8 a.m. on a southbound train heading into the station, The Canadian Press reported. It got off at Spadina and wandered around the platform for a while before escaping into a nearby tunnel.

Whether this was the same raccoon I saw, or how it got from the eastbound platform to the other line, I couldn't possibly know; I was at work by this point.

I can only hope the raccoon got wherever it was going, too.

Evan Annett is a digital content editor with The Globe and Mail.

With a report from The Canadian Press

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