Ashley Bennett is used to seeing raccoons in her Maple Ridge, B.C., yard.
However, a recent incident has left her shaken.
Bennett moved into the home with her family in 2020 and found the raccoons when they dismantled a deck.
She said they have co-existed since then, with a rule for every family member not to touch or feed the animals.
They’ll actually sit on the tree and the dogs will be in the backyard,” Bennett said.
“There’s no growling, there’s no snarling, there’s no nothing… If I don’t see them for 24 hours, that’s suspicious. They are always around.”
Bennett had just returned from the school run last week when she found the mom and a baby raccoon unconscious, with one of the babies sleeping on the furniture.
She came outside and said the little raccoon didn’t stir at all.
“Its ears didn’t flutter, not anything, which is beyond uncommon,” Bennett said.
“So I sort of tiptoed up to it and nothing. And I began sort of poking it and scratching it on the head a little bit and it was completely silent.”
She called Critter Care Wildlife Society but they were not open so she called Dr. Adrian Walton at the Dewdney Animal Hospital.
He said she could bring the raccoon in.
“I took my cat out of its banana box that it sleeps in and picked up this raccoon, which was completely lifeless, flopped it into my arms and back into the box,” Bennett said.
“And I just carried the box out. I couldn’t find a cat carry case. I couldn’t find a kennel, anything.”
The baby raccoon was sleeping on the patio furniture and could not be roused.
Ashley Bennett
When she arrived at the vet, Walton took the baby into an examination room and Bennett said that what happened next was wild.
“I wasn’t in the room but starting from the outside, it was 30 seconds of silence to full chaos,” she said.
“There was glass breaking, food falling on the floor, what sounded like shelves being cleared off. People were not yelling, but you could hear the panic in the room.”
Walton said when the baby arrived at the clinic it was comatose.
“It was super cold. His heart rate was super low. Its pupils were dilated. We were significantly worried that this thing was dying as we spoke.”
Walton said he didn’t know what had happened to the raccoon but he was quickly able to rule out poison and other toxins due to the animal’s lack of symptoms.
“So one of the things we started thinking of was fentanyl,” he said.
“We decided to do a reversing agent, a.k.a. the veterinary version of Narcan.”
Walton said that created a reaction he was not expecting.
“The next thing we know, we have this raccoon rampaging around the clinic and all of us are trying to herd it into an exam room so that we could actually get it confined,” he said.
Walton and his staff scrambled to find a case in which to put the animal.
“By the time we got back to the exam room, it had basically knocked down every glass container we had and was trying to climb up our computer screen into this little nook that is in our exam rooms,” Walton said.
“And if we had gotten in there, we were not going to get it out easily.”
Donning protective gear, the staff were able to catch the little guy and start to put it into the cage.
“At which point it walked right in, turned around, grabbed the door by his hand and shut it,” Walton said.
“It’s like, ‘I’ve had enough of this’.”
They gave the raccoon Narcan again, sent him home with Bennett and Walton said they were prepared to go to Bennett’s house at the end of the day to administer Narcan to the rest but luckily that was not needed.
While this is the first raccoon they have revived with Narcan, Walton said over the last 18 years they have dealt with an increase in the number of animals, mostly pets, that have consumed narcotics.
But in this case, he said they believe it was fentanyl due to the response to Narcan.
“There are other drugs that it could have gone into that they would also recover with stimulation, but we had an animal that went from really lethargic to wide awake after Narcan application,” Walton said.
Bennett said the baby continued to sleep in her backyard for about 48 hours after she brought it home.
“I’m blown away that it is this close to home out where we are,” she said. “I never thought so. My kids walk to school. We have dogs we walk. This is devastating.”
She said all the raccoons have been back since and are accounted for and she hopes there are no further incidents.
“I’ve grown so fond of these guys, and I think that anybody who knows me knows how much I actually adore them,” Bennett said.
“So it was really sad. I was really panicked about it.”