Category: Stranger than Fiction

If you haven’t seen it yet, go to YouTube and watch this channel now: James Blackwood – Raccoon Whisperer.

Blackwood is a retired RCMP officer who lives in Pictou County, Nova Scotia and now feeds raccoons full-time. The raccoons eat well — here’s what he’s fed them:

Sometimes he serves chicken hot dogs, hard-boiled eggs, grapes, apples, bananas and unsalted peanuts.

“I cook sausages for them, I do Hamburger Helper with sauteed mushrooms, Vienna sausages, roast chicken, pigs-in-a-blanket. And Tim Hortons doughnuts.”

(For those of you unfamiliar with Canada, Tim Hortons is more than just a place to get donuts. It’s synonymous with Canadian identity.)

Here’s more from a CBC article titled Meet the ‘Raccoon Whisperer’ of Pictou County:

One of his oldest raccoon friends, Rascal, will turn 13 in the spring. He knows her birthday because it was her mother that first reached out to him from the raccoon world. She had been hurt, likely by a car, and so Blackwood and his wife Jane took her in. That was 1999. “We gave a soft release into the wild and she’s been here with us every year since,” he says.

That raccoon later returned with her cub, which Blackwood and his wife named Rascal. His wife took to raccoons with a passion and on some nights 18 turned up for the late-night eats.

Jane Blackwood died in 2003 of cancer. Jim Blackwood merged her love of raccoons with his love for her, and so became the Raccoon Whisperer. “I fell in love with the animal and would not have it any other way. I am a retired RCMP officer and this is what I do full time,” he says.

It may seem that Blackwood is training his own Raccoon Army of the night, but I get the feeling the raccoons have trained him to be a reliable source of exotic food that’s just unavailable to most wild creatures.

He should be doing reasonably well if he’s monetizing his YouTube videos. He currently has 328,000 subscribers, and a number his videos have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views.

It’s not all raccoons and peanut butter sandwiches on his channel. Sometimes, he’ll throw in a musical performance:

Go ahead, watch this channel — it’s mesmerizing!

James Blackwood – Raccoon Whisperer

The Sky News headline reads “Pair hired for man’s broom sexual fantasy turn up in bedroom at wrong address with machetes,” and has the subheading “After appearing in an unsuspecting resident’s bedroom with knives at 6.15am, the duo accepted their mistake, saying ‘sorry mate’”.

I love the rather matter-of-fact account of what happened:

Police said the intended client had “history and proclivity for engaging the services of people”.

He had made arrangements with a man on Facebook for people to engage in the role play, and sent his address – before he later updated it after moving house more than 30 miles away.

But the resident of the home where the men mistakenly turned up to told police that when he noticed a light on in his lounge at around 6.15am, he assumed it was a friend who visits daily to make coffee.

He said he called out: “B***** off, it’s too early.”

After hearing a voice asking “is your name Kevin?”, the man said he turned his light on to see two men he did not recognise standing next to his bed, both holding machetes.

A conversation then ensued, in which the pair repeatedly sought to establish whether he was “Kevin”, each time being told “no” in response.

At one point, one of them asked: “Are you sure you are not Kevin as we were told to come to [this address] and pick up Kevin.”

Eventually accepting their error, the duo then left, with one saying “sorry mate” and shaking the resident’s hand, while the other said “bye”.

The resident then called police.

I have questions:

1. It’s supposed to be a “broom fantasy”. Why did they bring machetes?
2. How do you get a wrong address in the age of GPS?
3. Maybe I’m getting old, but who schedules a fantasy encounter for 6:15 a.m.? These days, the only thing I fantasize about at that time is more sleep.