On July 9, 2015, a dead raccoon appeared on a Toronto sidewalk and, for reasons no one fully understood, four men from a nearby office decided to hold a funeral. They bought a cellophane-wrapped rose, signed a card, and placed it on the corpse, whom they named Conrad.
In “Our Wild Familiars” (Crown, out Tuesday), Dan Werb uses Conrad’s wake as the doorway into an exploration of synanthropes — a term derived from Greek that means “together with man” and is used to describe wild creatures who have found niches in human-built cities.
“I love the story of Conrad, because it’s so unlikely and revealing,” Werb told The Post. “There are hundreds of thousands of raccoons living in Toronto, and many die every day. Everyone’s first instinct is to ignore them … [but Conrad] revealed that we actually love the animals around us, precisely because they are funny, and elegant, and make us think differently about what makes a city special.”
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