[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto's renegade capybaras: folk heroes for the social media age"

[rfmcdonald]

Eric Andrew-Gee's article in The Globe and Mail looks at the import of the escaped capybaras of High Park.

[A]s the hunt settled into a waiting game, the capybaras themselves erupted into the city’s collective consciousness. Newspapers breathlessly reported every sighting. TV news trucks became a fixture around High Park. Social media went wild.

Soon, there were not one but two capybara Twitter accounts. Clever designers pasted their image everywhere. A bar on Queen Street West changed its WiFi password to “Capybara.” And one Twitter user implored High Park’s annual Shakespeare production to put The Taming of the Capybara on the program.

Even before the Toronto escape, capybaras were pseudo-stars of the Internet, beloved and endlessly memed for their surreal physical hybridity and Eeyore-ish countenance.

This was different. Early on, the capybaras were cast as heroic rebels. The nicknames didn’t take long: Bonnie and Clyde. When one local wag placed them in a photo of Steve McQueen’s motorcycle from The Great Escape, the transformation was complete.

Their lionization may have reflected a growing cultural unease with animal captivity, crystallized recently by the shooting of Harambe the gorilla after a child found his way into the ape’s enclosure. Or it may be the idea of once-tame animals fending for themselves in the wilds of High Park, which seems to have a special hold on the Canadian imagination: Last year’s Giller Prize-winning novel, Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis, is about a pack of dogs with human minds set loose in the same park.