Toronto’s favourite dead raccoon now memorialized in butter

TORONTO – First he was toast, now he’s butter.

Conrad the raccoon is back, sculpted into a slab of butter at Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition.

The furry critter whose demise on a downtown street in July brought Torontonians together in grief and giggles is now being memorialized by a sculptor.

Every year, the CNE — fondly known as “the Ex” to local residents — invites local artists to create butter sculptures in a refrigerated, glass-enclosed space as visitors watch. Former Toronto mayor Rob Ford and Yoda were among the fan favourites of years past.

This year, a buttery duplication of a dead Conrad, lying flat on his back in the middle of makeshift shrine, has become a social media sensation.

The creation even features butter roses situated around him and a framed butter portrait of the waving, grinning raccoon in happier times.

Earlier this summer, a group of Torontonians who noticed the dead raccoon created the shrine to the animal in the hours it took for municipal animal control workers to show up and dispose of his corpse.

“A fitting tribute to a wonderful trash panda … this gives me closure,” wrote someone on the Toronto Reddit page.

The sculpture appears to be the work of Olenka Kleban, a sculptor who posted photos of the raccoon butter creation to her Instagram account. In 2012, she sculpted Ford in butter at the CNE event.