An animal answer

The Complete and Total Loser's neighborhood has changed since he grew up in it in the sixties. 
It's still made up of mostly well-to-do whites, though now they're whites who grew up in the suburbs, not ones who emigrated from the city, like the Loser's parents and neighbors. The population has burgeoned, but the proportion of whites to other races is probably about the same as it was.
The change the Loser's talking about is in animals.
When growing up, you'd hear about people seeing an opossum, raccoon, or skunk, but about the only time you'd see one yourself was when it was dead on the road, killed by a night time driver, a college kid, probably. When the Loser was sixteen, a deer vaulted across the road he and a friend were driving on. They were so excited by the rare vision they went to the area the next day to look for its tracks, as if to prove to themselves it had been real. 
It's different now. 
Since summer, the Loser has caught four raccoons (the most recent just yesterday), two skunks, an opossum and the same feral cat twice. Deer often hang out in his back yard for hours at a time. Last night, the Loser shone a flashlight out back and two pairs of deer eyes glowed back. Both had laid down, ready for a cold November night.
One word explains the change. Dogs.
When the Loser was a kid, dogs were never leashed in the suburbs. They ran free, got in fights, killed animals or, if they found an already dead animal, rolled around on its corpse. Seldom neutered, the males would disappear for days at a time, traveling for miles to mate with a bitch in heat. The Loser's dog did this into his sixteenth year, returning hungry and grinning. His DNA is in a lot of dogs by now. 
Now, of course, everyone's so timid and litigious that the idea of a child being nipped by a dog and the packs of personal injury lawyers has made that impossible. Any dog just roaming a neighborhood is assumed to be feral, maybe even rabid. 
So the animals run free, with no natural predators except maybe a fox or two and, of course, cars, their primary foe.

If the Loser knew how to hunt and butcher deer, he'd have to buy a meat locker.

Non-stop animal invasion

The Complete and Total Loser has now trapped four raccoons since summer. To some of those living in the countryside, that's a piddling number, but the Loser lives in an East Coast suburb where there are so many cars it's amazing there are any non-flying animals left at all. 
He trapped this one overnight on a Friday, meaning he released it on a Saturday morning. That's not easy, because anyplace suitable for raccoon release and car access is also coveted by runners and walkers and their dogs. Usually, the Loser doesn't set the trap on weekends for this reason but he hadn't baited it for days and simply didn't bother. 
The release was a suspenseful one, with a 30-second window, if that.
The raccoon looks mean but was very sweet, actually. A young one, it was just mushing its face against the cage, the way a kid watching TV might against a sofa arm.

The Loser's latest catch now lives miles away.

The second skunk

The Duchess of Cambridge exits a car.

The Complete and Total Loser caught a second skunk Saturday night and let it go Sunday morning. (It's the raccoons in the attic he's after and he thinks—hopes—he's got all of them.)
Hours after this, while the Loser was outside working around the yard, the thought popped into his head that when non-domesticated animals see humans leaving cars they think we're escaping from them.

A trapped skunk waits to be release.

Second capture

Raccoons are different, though it's not like the Complete and Total Loser has much experience with wild animals. The one he caught earlier this morning and released in a park far away hours later didn't react the way the Loser would if he were a captured animal. 
For all the raccoon knew, it was going to be killed in some horrible way. If it caught a frog, for example, it may bite off a hind leg first. Then an arm. Meanwhile the frog's alive to see this. The Loser doesn't approve of eating meat and eats little of it himself, but at least when most humans kill animals for food they try to make its death quick of not entirely painless.
If the Loser were in this trap, he'd snarl and spit at his captor. This raccoon, however, like its friend captured late last week, just looked sad. 
The Loser let it go in the same spot as the first in the hopes that the two will find each other and live out their raccoon lives in a peaceful wilderness.

A raccoon in a Havahart trap.