14 September 2017

Raccoons

Shock immigration news.

By Chin Chin

It is always a shock returning to England.  After days of making difficult decisions over which wine to drink with lunch, you find that you have got completely out of touch with current affairs.  Perhaps it is best, then, to glance at the news a few days before returning, just to see how everyone has been getting on.  It was in this spirit that I searched for information on Brexit to see what developments there had been.  Actually there wasn’t much of interest.  The negotiations are still at an early stage and the protagonists continue to glare at each other from entrenched positions.  No blinking yet.  I began to glaze over.  Suddenly, however, I woke up with a start.  There, reported by the BBC itself, was a headline which put the whole debate into context: “Raccoon rescued from Cambridgeshire roof is French”.

In fact the headline hardly did justice to the facts.  The raccoon, which bears a French microchip, is thought to have smuggled itself into the UK in the back of a lorry.  Who knows how many previous attempts it had made and for how long it had been at Sangatte testing the security of the Channel Tunnel?  How had the French gendarmes missed it?  Had they really overlooked it or was this a case of the restrictive French approach to employment contracts which M Macron is so keen to stamp out?

“La loi dit rien des animaux furieux, Marcel, et cela n’est pas un immigrant human.”

“Mais peut-etre, Louis, nous doisons noter le microchip?”

“Et qui va demander du raccoon le numero de son microchip? Vous, Marcel?”

“Hmm. Il a les grands dents”

“Exactement!  Ah, je vois que c’est l’heure de dejeuner.”

Be that as it may, on arrival, the raccoon escaped into the Cambridgeshire countryside (did it have to threaten the lorry driver to release it there?) and lived rough for about five months, making no attempt to contact the authorities.  Probably this was overcautious as free movement does not end until Brexit but anyway the story has a happy ending.  The raccoon is to live at an animal shelter in Kent where “she [it turns out to be a she] can live in a safe and secure environment with other raccoons to call friends”.  Probably this was the raccoon’s ambition all along, so from her point of view things have gone rather well.

But there is a more serious aspect to this story.  If you put the word “raccoon” into your search engine you will discover that there are a surprising number of them in the UK.  And very intelligent animals they are, too.  One recently entered a house in Northamptonshire through the cat flap and then started opening and rummaging through drawers.  It had to be barricaded in until the authorities arrived because raccoons are good at opening doors and it might have escaped.  Another was found at the Woodhouse Primary School in Birmingham, having taken up residence in the playground bike shed. Presumably it had heard all about the school catchment system and thought that it shouldn’t leave things to chance.  Still, its thirst for knowledge says something about it, doesn’t it?  Typical first-generation immigrant behaviour.  If you want to succeed here you need some local qualifications and to speak received English.  True, Birmingham might sound a strange choice for this but perhaps the school is a particularly good one.

Looked at from the Brexiteer’s perspective there are certainly causes for concern.  What sort of a strain are these immigrant raccoons putting on local services?  The one spotted rummaging through chests of drawers may have larcenous instincts which will require social welfare to become engaged.  As for the Birmingham one, we know that places at good schools are at a premium.  Who is being pushed out so that this immigrant can take their place?  Yes, it may be more intelligent and ambitious than some of the local children but one cannot expect their parents to regard that as a reason why the newcomers should be preferred.

In the animal kingdom too there is cause for concern.  Will raccoons take all the plum jobs?  Are they good at catching mice and rats, for example, and could they do it more cheaply than the native cat?  The animals described in the media seem to be good at foraging so would presumably be content with less food.  That could make them more attractive to the unscrupulous employer.  Perhaps the only answer is to produce some sort of minimum wage – one tin of cat meat for every three mice, or something like that.

But the real worry is that these raccoons are not in fact lone wolves but engaged in some form of jihad.  Given the signal they will rise up and seize strategic points, paralysing the UK’s response to an external threat, rather like Raymond Shaw in the sixties film “the Manchurian Candidate”.  Hopefully the boffins at MI5 are looking for the trigger – and given the behaviour of the Northamptonshire raccoon it might make sense to examine just what was in those drawers.  At the very least they should be putting undercover agents into the animal shelters as part of the Prevent strategy.

Still, we should not ignore the potential either.  We are always told that Britain has benefitted hugely from immigration in the past.  It seems that a number of highly intelligent animals have been planted in our countryside.  Well, how intelligent exactly?  Could they be employed in elite animal roles such as searching for drugs at airports, or is their potential of quite a different order?  Could they, for example, do some of the jobs currently done by humans?  Street sweeping, perhaps, or even entering politics?  “My honourable friend, the raccoon for Northamptonshire……”

 

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