By: Aaron Richardson
Reports are flooding into The Peak saying that SFU’s administration has been taken over by the raccoon population on Burnaby campus. While these reports are just arriving, it seems as if this raccoup d’état took place back in March, the raccoons being responsible for the actions of SFU’s administration since that time. The attack occurred so suddenly and was finished so quickly that most of the population of SFU was entirely unaware that the administration had been replaced by raccoons for months.
While the raccoon population on Burnaby Mountain has long been a subject of concern to SFU’s administration, no efforts had ever been put underway to curb their rapid expansion. This appears to have been a grave mistake.
Since March, many leading figures at SFU, such as president and vice-chancellor Andrew Petter, have been held hostage, and were only released a couple of days ago. Upon release, Petter commented on the raccoon population: “By the time we realized the dangers that [the raccoons] posed, it was too late — their population had grown too high. We knew that any efforts we could take against them would instead only inflict their wrath back upon us. Since then, we just spent the time waiting to see how long it would be before they realized the power they had themselves. In all honesty, we were surprised that they didn’t attack sooner.”
While many outside sources reporting on the incident seem to be confused about how it took so long for the raccoup to be brought to the public eye, students and staff at SFU were unperturbed. “Well, they don’t really do anything anyways,” said a sixth-year engineering student. “When the raccoons took over, there wasn’t much of a difference in leadership.”
At any other university, seeing raccoons regularly walk down the halls would be considered irregular. But this was already a regular occurrence at SFU, and therefore, the raccoon regime was barely even a change to students and staff. What was a change was when the raccoons started becoming patrons at Renaissance Coffee. When asked how they responded to this remarkable display of intelligence on behalf of the raccoons, Renaissance staff responded, saying “we’re in the business of customer service, not asking questions. They want coffee? Give them coffee. A customer is a customer. We’re just glad they aren’t going to Starbucks.”
The raccoup was only revealed in late May, a month into the summer semester. While many classes were already being taught by some of the more intelligent raccoons, students weren’t about to complain. “Hey, she may be a raccoon, but she’s better than the last prof I had,” reported a third-year psychology student. “She shows up on time, grades fairly, and I actually know what she expects from us for our assignments and papers. For our last paper we just had to hand in garbage wrapped in deli meat. But, hey, a paper is paper.”
The motivations behind this attack remain unknown. The best guess at the moment is that, to the raccoons, SFU was essentially not much more than a large garbage can. One striking finding is that this raccoup has been in the works for years now. Across campus, students have frequently seen raccoons picking through garbage cans, along with the first-years who are stupid enough to take pictures of them. It appears they were not salvaging food, but instead, supplies for the attack. Not only were they smart enough to plan for this takeover, we were stupid enough to watch them do it.
While it’s still unclear how or when SFU administration will take back control of the campus, it seems SFU operations will be running smoothly until that time.
