The dangers are obvious and numerous; though a typical healthcare regime in a first-world country such ours includes safe vaccines for many critical diseases including measles and polio, vaccines for diseases such as rabies are not yet safe enough to be administered generally and preemptively. And while certain precautionary measures to reduce environmental rabies load can be taken including air-dropped vaccine-laced raccoon baits, the best precaution remains to ensure that humans remain indoors while animals remain outside where they're supposed to.

Animal-proof garbage receptacles therefore must necessarily be installed. Though they cost a little more than less durable alternatives, they more than make up for it in efficacy and an increased functional lifespan. What's more, if a prudent policy is pursued whereby all homeowners are equipped with these receptacles, then their unit price will likely plummet in turn.

But as important as raccoons are in the urban ecosystem and as much as they contribute to health nuisances and other nuisances experienced by apartment dwellers and other owners of urban real estate, they are hardly the sole public nuisances.

Pigeons and other urban birds can be effectively controlled with hawk decoys, giving the illusion of an ever-present predatory threat. And where it is not feasible to erect a bobbing prosthetic hawk, lifelike models of dead birds can be placed in strategically visible positions — birds, no less than we humans, know to steer clear of places where their fellow creatures have died of exposure.

Once wild animals have been accounted for, it is necessary to address the problem of feral animals — once-domesticated animals who have forsaken their homes and now live in the open environment without direct assistance from people. Though there is a widespread humane movement to control feral-animal populations by severing their reproductive cycles through spaying and neutering, feral dogs and cats roam the streets of nearly every metropolitan city.

Methods less humane for controlling feral-animal populations have been proposed including more widespread trapping. The proposal, if implemented, would have snares and traps placed at locations where feral animals trot or sleep but where people don't tread as they go about their days and walk to work and such. A similar proposal would have food items intentionally baited with toxic poisons and left where animals can reach and consume them.

These suggestions, however, are fraught with problems and not simply because of the cost of implementing them. If their effects could be confined to only animals we do not care about, then that would be one thing. But inevitably, our own pets (ones we do care about) would be snared or poisoned, and that would be unacceptable. (Whereas humans know well enough not to go hunting through trash heaps looking for tasty morsels, the same cannot be said for Rex, who would gladly dive into a trash heap and wolf down a three-day-old slice of pizza, strychnine or no, if given the chance.) No educated public would support a policy that leaves their beloved pets to die in the streets, and so those proposals are dead on arrival. Thankfully, a sensible increase in the employment of dog catchers to round strays up and get them off the streets, into shelters, and eventually into homes, is as viable as ever.

By taking these and other prudent steps, we can ensure that scenes like the one I alluded to in the introduction don't have to be repeated. We cannot simply sit idly by and wish these problems would go away; they require a concerted effort on our part to address and resolve them. Let us not shirk today from that moral obligation.