The animal made it to the roof last night, where traps baited with cat food were waiting. The raccoon, a female, was released later and scampered into a wooded area on private property near the Twin Cities suburb of Shakopee.
Suzanne MacDonald, a raccoon behaviour expert at York University in Toronto, said: "Raccoons don't think ahead very much, so raccoons don't have very good impulse control. I don't think the raccoon realised when it started climbing what it was in for."
Initial speculation was that the raccoon climbed to a lower part of the building, frequented by pigeons, in search of bird eggs.
But workers who tried to lure it down with a wooden ramp likely just scared it, said Phil Jenni, executive director of the Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre of Minnesota.
So it did what raccoons do when they're stressed: it climbed. It's not unusual for raccoons to climb fairly tall trees and other structures, according to MacDonald and Jenni, though neither had heard of one climbing such a tall building before.
- AP
