@alannondarklord TBH I felt the complete opposite: because you can visually see it's a person, yet the Foundation insist that no matter what happens he's a racoon, even with the amount of people that are resistant to cognito and infohazards there, I feel even more dread.
It's such a powerful anomally he's fallen prey to that everything and anything that he does, he'll just be taken as a common racoon.
Previously you could maybe say "oh, he's just a human that was turned into a racoon, with some characteristics from his humanity that he somehow still has". Now it's "oh shit, it's just a normal person that can't, under apparently any condition, be identified or it's actions understood as a surprisingly able common racoon".
Yeah, the ambiguity of the text version certainly has a charm of it's own, in trying to understand just what happens and having to decide for yourself how it all works, but for me, just the sheer despair of the situation in here makes the story work as well.