I feel great sympathy for Dong Nguyen, the Toronto man who pleaded guilty this week to a charge of cruelty to animals for hitting several raccoons with a shovel as they foraged in his backyard.

That’s because I know exactly how frustrated and angry Nguyen must have felt when he attacked the nasty pests.

By pleading guilty, he was given a conditional discharge that includes 100 hours of community service at a humane society shelter. He must also pay $1,365 to a wildlife centre where one of the raccoons he hit was treated for a broken leg.

Over the years, I’ve chased raccoons off my front porch and back deck with a broom, buckets of water and cleaning sprays. I’ve waved towels at them, yelled at them, charged at them, turned garden hoses on them and shone flashlights in their faces.

Nothing stops them.

At night, they try to rip their way into my secured garbage and green bins. In summer, they tear up my tiny front and back lawns almost nightly in search of grubs. And for the past week, two fat raccoons have tried every evening — unsuccessfully — to pry open the sliding glass door into my kitchen.

I’ve never actually hit a raccoon, but I’ve sure felt like it.

Indeed, it seems everyone in Toronto and the 905 region has a bitter raccoon story to tell. Next to real estate prices, raccoon war stories are a major topic whenever neighbours get together, with vivid tales of raccoons getting into garbage bins, ruining gardens, camping out in garages, nesting between walls and crawl spaces and setting up house under porches.

In fact, they’ve become urban pests like rats and mice.

Their numbers are growing rapidly, with rough estimates ranging up to nearly 100,000 in Toronto alone. They can carry diseases such as rabies and parasites such as ringworm. Their babies may be cute with their bandit-mask faces, but their feces, which they leave on decks and patios, can be noxious and a mess to clean.

So why don’t Toronto and the 905 municipalities launch programs to cull the pests? Are they waiting for raccoons to be officially declared a public health hazard?

Diehard animal lovers may oppose killing raccoons, but we permit the killing of rats and mice and allow the humane euthanizing of thousands of stray and unwanted cats and dogs every year.

Why not the humane killing of raccoons?

Toronto was dubbed the “raccoon capital of the world” in a David Suzuki CBC documentary on the critters. Pest control experts say the population has exploded in Toronto since the city introduced green recycling bins, which became one-stop feeding stations for raccoons.

If you want to deal with raccoons yourself, there’s not much that works.

The official City of Toronto website, though, offers a few tips on how to control raccoons. “Try sprinkling naptha flakes around the area, hanging ammonia-soaked rags, playing a loud radio tuned to an all-talk station, keeping the area brightly lit,” it suggests.

Good luck, I say.

Toronto Animal Control won’t deal with raccoons unless they are injured or sick. Instead, it advises you to hire a private pest control company. These can cost $300 just to show up at your door. They will trap the raccoons and “safely” remove them, which basically means they will transport them to a nearby neighbourhood and release them.

That’s not controlling the raccoons. That’s merely moving them around.

Sadly, raccoon experts admit it’s impossible for residents to get rid of the pests.

Even Toronto’s own official website virtually gives up, saying cheerily that we’d better get used to raccoons.

“By learning how to share the environment with them and reducing conflict by eliminating sources of food and shelter on our properties,” it says, “we can be entertained by catching sight of these visitors as they make their way to a more suitable home.”

There’s no reason why Toronto can’t launch its own raccoon-cull program. The province did just that in 1999 when it reduced the raccoon problem in eastern Ontario. In 1997, Mississauga tackled its overpopulation troubles with Canada geese by shipping 2,000 of them to New Brunswick.

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If municipalities can control rats, mice, cats and dogs by euthanasia, they should be able to do the same for raccoons, which arguably are more of a pest and potential health issue than stray cats.

Mayor Rob Ford should seriously consider making the war on raccoons a priority. In my neighbourhood at least, he’d surely win huge support for the program — and maybe even a few votes.