The other thing is, my own anecdotal experience contrasts with your own anecdotal experience. (For what that's worth, which isn't much, I admit.)
I've lived in big cities almost all my life and people around me have killed or otherwise sought to harm raccoons on numerous occasions. They're thought of as pest, and in cities, pests abound unless you do drastic things. I've heard raccoons killed outside my window, I've seen bunnies dead from being fed rat poison, etc. In big cities. There's the pests angle, but there's also a fear of animals that seems to be associated with a lack of familiarity with and experience around animals that rural settings are more conducive to having.
By contrast, the years I spent living in rural places I encountered much more sensible attitudes towards things like raccoons. I found that people who live somewhere that leaves one more aware of one's place in nature have more respect for it.
Of course, there were numerous exceptions to both dynamics. And again, just my experience, but I think the notion that city-dwellers are somehow friendlier to nature is a too-easy misconception that's fueled mostly by the us-vs.-them narrative that's being pushed on us by politicians and the media alike. Country-dwellers hate nature! City-dwellers love nature! It's just too easy, too lacking nuance.
And then there's the whole problem to get around of cities being the most subdued nature there is: pouring concrete and asphalt over a large piece of nature and then claiming some kind of moral authority is a difficult concept for me. Manhattan used to be populated by the Lenape...
I know that per-capita you could make a strong case that cities have lower impact per capita, but something about that just doesn't feel sufficient to me.