From what I remember spending time on this topic, raccoons need super challenging locks as toys and TONS of engagement from their keepers because they get bored easily and bored raccoons == ultra destructive raccoons. Also, rabies.
They're pretty great pets. We had one for a while when I was a kid. Its mom got run over and we nursed it and raised it for a few months. Instinctively used the same litter box as the cats. Hung out on the couch sitting on my shoulder watching TV. Friendly and playful. Would follow people around and play with toys.
The biggest challenge is that they basically have hands. He would climb up the kitchen cabinets, grab a box of cereal, open it up and sit there eating out of it like a toddler.
We only had him for a few months before reintroducing him to the woods behind the house. I've wanted a pet raccoon again ever since.
A former girlfriend of mine had a picture of her mother holding a Raccoon. I asked her mother about it and she said that they lived out in the woods in Minnesota and they found it on the porch when it was a baby. The mother had died or something so they kinda raised it. It was free roaming in/out of the house but they could hold it and it would also get into their food. She mentioned one time it ate a bunch of mixed nuts...but didn't like one type so it left all those in the bowl. Another time it ate an entire pie...but left her one piece ("so she wouldn't get angry").
She did say it was never really a "pet"...more like a wild animal that sometimes acted like one.
This would have been in the late 70s early 80s by my guess on her age in the pictures.
I remember reading somewhere once that baby raccoons are actually quite cuddly and tame; but that when they go adolescence, they have a hormone shift that makes them aggressive enough to be unsuitable as a pet. In the story a woman who had raised a baby raccoon was attacked by it after it grew to a certain age.
There's a Japanese anime from the '70s called something like "rascal the racoon", based on an American book, which tells the story of a kid with a pet raccoon.
I've wanted a pet raccoon since I saw this on TV in the '80s, and raccoons aren't even a thing in Europe :(
Family raised multiple raccoons over the years until wildlife rescue became more of a common thing you could call up. The garage was seemingly a hot spot for the occasional runt raccoon with closed eyes to be left behind.
They not only get bored they get very particular with who in the family they enjoy following. Which can cause even more havoc when someone gets upset the raccoon doesn't want to be around them. One particularly funny story was a customer's kid (Business was attached to the house) begged and cried to be let hold the raccoon. We all knew it was a bad idea but Grandpa caved to the customer's demands so the kid would shut up. The racoon gladly let me hand her over to the kid, crawled up on the kids shoulder and proceeded to shit from one shoulder to the other then immediately jump off and return to my shoulder to glare at the kid. Never again did we let anyone outside the family touch the raccoon until we gave her up to a local zoo for use in educational programs since she was fairly well trained to behave for treats.
Just make sure you know your state's laws and regulations very well. I had a friend in a mid-western state that was caring for a couple of babies when a tree fell and killed their mother. They were in contact with a licensed rescue to get them to them. The Dept. of Conservation caught wind and showed up at their house, took the animals, walked into their back yard with them and shot them on the spot.
Assuming you are starting with a wild raccoon, get one from a population that is not in the eastern parts of the US or Canada and rabies is unlikely.
Here in Washington state for example there have been no documented cases of rabies in any wild raccoon in at least 60 years. Same goes for all other wild terrestrial mammals here.
Sometimes I I think people really underestimate the circumstances needed for domestication of a species to be successful. There's this conception of our human abilities as something that supersedes the way nature works and shape things the way we want, which might at least appear to be true in a lot of cases, but I don't think that domestication can work just because we happen to want it to.
The most coherent take I've read on it is that there actually needs to be an evolutionary advantage for the species in order for the domestication to work out, which means it's essentially something that needs to take place over generations. Raccoons being cute and fluffy might be a reason that we would like to have them around, but I think the larger question is whether there's a good enough reason for them to develop a lifestyle where they hang around indoors with humans. Putting it in terms of evolution also can help clarify why the personality characteristics you mention aren't a simple obstacle to overcome; the fact that they might be better off as a species in the long run if they could just immediately switch over to being a type of house pet like a cat or dog might not be enough if the path to that from where they are now requires significant "downward movement" from a local optimum in the short term for the adaptions start becoming more advantageous so that the can reach a higher optimum.
> Raccoons are a rabies reservoir in the eastern United States, extending from Canada to Florida and as far west as the Appalachian Mountain range. Within these areas, 10% of raccoons that expose people or pets have rabies, making them one of the highest rabies-risks in the United States.
It's an odd framing. Out of R_t total raccoons, R_e bite or scratch (potentially "expose") humans. R_e / 10 of those were carrying rabies. So it could be that raccoons almost never bite/scratch humans, such that the behavioral effects of rabies are a significant motivator. It also could be that raccoons bite/scratch humans all of the time, and a ton of those raccoons have rabies. The latter is scary, but the former is likely the truth.
I wonder if increased interactions between humans and raccoons will lead to a reduction in that 10% figure (more reasons to bite humans).
It's that it's not 10% of racoons have rabies, but 10% of the ones that expose people to a bite scratch etc. The reason the numbers aren't the same, significantly less than 10% of them have rabies, is mainly that rabies itself can make them more hostile etc., on top of if bitten by a racoon that is more symptomatic seeming you are much more likely to get it checked out.
I think the idea is that a raccoon you encounter is conditionwlly more likely to have rabies just based on the fact that you've encountered it. My understanding is that rabid racoons are less nocturnal and far less likely to feel the need to run or hide from humans.
It's possible they botched the grammar here a little, but my interpretation is saying that if you look at the group of raccoons that allow themselves to be exposed itself to a human or pet (rather than avoiding us, which is not that hard for them to do it they want), around 10% of them have rabies.
Just in time to spread a really awful parasite. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/human-cases-of-racco... "severe, frequently fatal, infections of the eyes, organs, and central nervous system. Those who survive are often left with severe neurological outcomes, including blindness, paralysis, loss of coordination, seizures, cognitive impairments, and brain atrophy"
We treat deer for ticks, etc. A decade ago, I think we would have been smart enough to treat wild raccoons for this parasite, but the time of human domestication is over. In another decade, I expect humans will be marking their territories with feces again.
> Oddly, tameness has also long been associated with traits such as a shorter face, a smaller head, floppy ears and white patches on fur—a pattern that Charles Darwin noted in the 1800s.
Hmm, so evolutionary pressure of existing around humans makes animals cuter.
I believe the main biological lever is retaining juvenile features as adults, physically as well as mentally (like with dogs). What we see as cute is an honest signal that they are more child-like: less aggressive, more trusting and pro-social.
I also think that this is the central cause of a wide variety of domestic/cute adaptations. There are too many separate features to believe that raccoons and dogs and cats and a dozen other species all select for these same elements independently.
I no longer have the book on hand, but read a few months ago that this correlation between juvenile traits and domestication was one of the main theses of Barrett's "Supernormal Stimuli" in Chapter 4. She cited a few studies of fox domestication [1], [2] and other works to support these theories.
My guess: possibly co-evolution. The article subsequently describes the genetics behind things becoming cute - which would have been completely benign to our ancestors (the core of your question). However, those of our ancestors who completed domestication of these animals (by random chance) would have enjoyed more protection from predators, rodents, etc. Those of our ancestors who attempted to domesticate things without the mutations might have had bad companions at best, and would have been predated at worst. This would have provided evolutionary pressure to adopt animals that were showing early signs of domestication. What we call "cute" is merely "likely to cooperate with us."
Since humans associate cuteness with large eyes and small body size, nocturnal / twilight animals, like raccoons, sugar gliders, cats, squirrels, etc have a larger chance to be domesticated as pets.
Daytime, larger animals (e.g. sheep, goats, or even rabbits) have a larger chance to be domesticated as food.
Experiment in taming foxes that relied on a single principle of selecting animals that react to humans with least fear and aggression resulted also in those morphological changes. I think it's more about selecting animals that retain youthful curiosity and other traits into their adult life. Youthful morphological features just tag along.
Perhaps a combination of adaptableness, small size, prodigious reproduction, and cuteness saved some species from being wiped out whereas other species didn't fare so well once humans arrived and transformed their territory. Adapt to urban encroachment or face extinction.
Cats aren't really domesticated. Out of many, many cat species we just found one that's well aligned with humans and it spread with humans to the whole world. No other cat species plays well with humans and none shows any signs of domestication.
Racoons, even city's racoons are terrible beasts. Sure, they are friendly when they aren't upset; Take a treat away from the hands of the sweetest racoon and it will either pounce on you to retrieve it, scream bloody murder, or pounce and slash at you until you retreat.
Racoons, especially in the city, will kill and eat an older housecat or easy to access domestic chickens without hesitation.
Declawing them helps, but nature happens when a declawed racoon feels a call to roam and is outmatched by even a small hawk or possum.
I have a bunch of racoons in my yard every night. A year ago, on some whim, they decided to rip open the less than secure but 8 ft in the air vent grating for the chicken coop.
Some chickens made it, most in fact. But playtime involved ripping the heads off 3 of them.
Raccoons have been living literally inside of houses for centuries.
One was kept as a pet in Jamestown Virginia in the 1600s. Another lived in the White House in the 1900s. Surely, not a decade has passed between have there been NO domesticated raccoons in the US? If living near humans changes animals, that started at least 25,000 years ago here in North America. Not recently.
My neighbors had a pet raccoon growing up. It lived inside but would come and go.
The people who wrote this article seem out of touch with the topic they chose to pretend to be experts about?
> Surely, not a decade has passed between have there been NO domesticated raccoons in the US?
An animal of wild parentage that was raised by humans is tame but not domesticated. So no, there's aren't really domesticated racoons, only tame ones.
Domestication is a process that takes many generations. It is a selective breeding process more than anything else. Animals that are 1 generation away from wild ancestors aren't domesticated, by definition.
And the last category is feral animals, "that live in the wild but are descended from domesticated individuals.".
> The people who wrote this article seem out of touch with the topic they chose to pretend to be experts about?
This is quickly becoming the norm for experts, unfortunately. I keep seeing more an more people with educational expertise in something that they have zero hands-on or practical experience with.
I remember being at a social event once and chatting with someone who was a business professor at any Ivy League university. Making small talk, I asked him which companies he'd worked at, and he told me that he had gone the academic track and started teaching during and after getting his PhD (in exactly what I don't remember). I remember being stunned that students would pay over $60k a year to learn about business from someone who'd never worked for or started a business.
> I remember being stunned that students would pay over $60k a year to learn about business from someone who'd never worked for or started a business.
Were you stunned that your parents paid lots of money to put you in front of educators from kindergarten to college?
Why would you restrict yourself to learning from one businessman when you can get learn from an educator who has distilled the experiences of hundreds if not thousands of business people?
That doesn't mean the process is happening naturally as asserted. For instance, wild black wolves in the US got this trait from hybridization with domesticated dogs.
I think you’re mistaking slight natural adaption for domestication, and taking domestication for granted. Go into nature and try and train a wild wolf. Good luck! You can’t.
Domestication, in the way that we see having happened with dogs (and cattle, and chickens) takes a really long time.
We consider cats “domesticated” and yet demonstrably they are not. If they were much bigger, they’d eat us, and if set into wild, nearly all household cats immediately revert to feral.
I owned five ferrets once. Loved them so much, but came to the realization that there are animals that should be pets and animals that maybe shouldn’t (yet). I think we have many, many more generations before raccoons are at the same level as dogs.
Ironic choice: ferrets are a wholly domesticated species of weasel, bred for rat hunting. They are domesticated, by any reasonable standard I'm aware of, as are cats.
I'm sorry your experience with cats hasn't been as pleasant, but I assure you they are much more domesticated than chickens - which you seem to have little experience with. Screw eating us - they'll eat each other.
Foxes too, generally. The average temperament tends to include curiosity, playfulness, and wariness but not moral fear of humans. People keep them as household pets so I'd call that domesticable. An experiment to speed up the process of fox domestication was undertaken. [0] Foxes tend to not be like almost all wolves (and many wolfdogs) which are reserved, not prone to social openness, and hard to read like American Akitas which makes them dangerous by dominance challenging, miscommunication, and untrustworthiness.
Imagine trying to keep an animal like that out of food it's not supposed to have (to include fish tanks). The dang things would probably learn to pick locks with their cute little hands.
Domestication often involves lower intelligence. Particularly for farm animals.
Consider the statement above that tame raccoons need "TONS of engagement from their keepers because they get bored easily". Breeding that out means essentially a less curious, more complacent animal. Cows and sheep that easily figure out how to escape their paddocks are a liability.
Which category do you think is more clever: Wolf and coyote; or pug and chihuahua?
dog breeds considered "clever" often more closely resemble their wild ancestors. And they are often not "easy" breeds to own.
Dogs are certainly better at looking intelligent. I think dogs, being a more social animal, are more eager to please, and so are willing to be trained.
Cats can vary wildly. One of my cats seems dumb as a box of rocks and haven't even grasped the idea of object permanence. If she's tracking a laser, and I move it around a corner, she can't figure out where it went. She goes from intense staring and tracking to standing up and looking around, confused. When I bring the laser back around the corner, she's instantly back to squatting and tracking it.
Dogs and cats have different modalities for intelligence.
Dogs are social animals that have evolved to be human companions a long time ago. This is why they are "trainable" and, therefore, seem more intelligent.
Cats are not; they are extremely good hunters that by and large tolerate humans in exchange for easy access to food and water. You can't really train them, but they will find hiding spots you didn't even know existed and you will NEVER have problems with mice with one around.
I don't really understand this. Isn't it about as surgically invasive as getting a pet spayed?
Does the scent gland do anything more than just stinking? For a cat, removing the claws literally removes bones from them. It limits their mobility and hurts like hell.
(Not that I want a pet skunk. Just curious as to why it's unethical)
> “I’d love to take those next steps and see if our trash pandas in our backyard are really friendlier than those out in the countryside,” she says.
Would they have to measure "biological" friendliness, comparing lab raised countryside-descended and city-descended raccoons? Domesticated animals can be very unfriendly. Feral cats for example.
Honestly, measuring the distance to which a single raccoon approaches is a pretty good proxy. City birds are self-domesticating right now; wrens willing to be on the same table as a human get more fries to eat. (And I've actually used this metric on them: the same one or two reliably get closer than the others.)
So Kassel, Germany, may have hope to be less harassed in the future?
FYI, Kassel kinda is the so-called capitol of raccoons. 30k+ raccoons life there, according to estimates.
I certainly would not want to live there. It is crazy how these animals flock together and invade properties. And they aren't shy anymore due to the reverse positive reinforcement they receive by not killing them.
Yes, it is of course in Germany forbidden to kill an invading predatory species - even on your property. This is Germany 2025.
Toronto, Canada is hands down the raccoon capital of the world. Something like 100k raccoons live in the city.
I can’t get my head around how such big animals manage to live all around us in such densely populated place. I suppose it helps that they are cartoonishly adorable.
But they are increasingly getting really, really big. It’s just a matter of time before the chonker living in my neighbour’s shed bullies me out of my house.
All you need to know about Toronto is that the generational effort to build a raccoon-resistant trash can has failed every time. They're unstoppable beasts!
Kassel is under 200k people, with ~100 raccoons/km² though!
Curiously, that raccoon population was established legally and intentionally in the 30s to bolster local fur production; later efforts to eradiacte the animals (for being pests from an agriculture perspective) have been given up.
Damage to local ecosystems seems fortunately pretty limited, even though the raccoons are highly successful and spreading.
The second link parent posted literally explains it, which makes their "oh no, German in 2025 so broken" quite puzzling:
> Es gibt viel zu viele Waschbären, um mit den erlaubten jagdlichen Mitteln im städtischen Umfeld eine nachhaltige Bestandsreduzierung bewirken zu können, denn Waschbären können hohe Verlustraten durch vermehrte Fortpflanzung ausgleichen. Je mehr Waschbären getötet werden, umso mehr Jungtiere kommen nach. Die vielen Jungtiere machen aber unter Umständen mehr Probleme als die Alten, und die Gefahr einer Ausbreitung von Krankheiten und Parasiten wird durch die abwandernden Jungtiere erhöht statt vermindert.
> There are too many raccoons for permitted hunting methods within an urban context to have a sufficient effect on population numbers as raccoons react to high death rates with increased breeding. The more raccoons are killed, the more young are born. The large amount of young raccoons can create more problems than older animals, and the danger of spreading disease and parasites is increased as young animals roam from established territories.
tl;dr: you're not allowed to just randomly shoot shit in urban areas because duh, the population is too large for trapping, and the raccoons are just gonna fuck more and then go a-wandering, making everything worse.
> Yes, it is of course in Germany forbidden to kill an invading predatory species - even on your property. This is Germany 2025.
Raccoons can and are hunted in Germany, what are you talking about? The federal laws regarding hunting don't mention them and thus allow states to decide. I haven't checked every states local laws and executive orders, but I'm not aware of any that don't allow hunting raccoons.
For thousands of years after domestication there were only a handful of dog breeds; hounds, sheepdogs etc, which were bred for their utility rather than appearance. It’s only in the last couple of hundred years that dog breeds have exploded.
On Facebook, there's been this running gag/joke/meme/whatever going for at least the last year, where anytime the official North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission page posts anything, a large portion of the comments quickly turn into a discussion of the merits (or lack thereof) of pet raccoons[1].
I don't know exactly how it started. Somebody innocently asked "How do I get a permit for a pet raccoon?" and the page replied "You can't, they are illegal in NC" or something prosaic like that I imagine. But it became a big "thing" and now raccoon talk is everywhere. The page controllers play along with it, which is part of why it's kept going so long I guess. But sometimes they'll get semi-serious and post something like
"Look, all joking aside, the reason pet raccoons are not allowed is because no matter how friendly raccoons look, they are wild animals, not domesticated, and they can be a hazard to you, and your family and <blah, etc, etc>".
Soooo... I'm just waiting to see somebody post this very article in a comment on that page with a note saying "Suck it, NCWRC!" (all in a spirit of good fun, of course).
[1]: or one or more of another of a small set of topics, including flounder, pet alligators, armadillos, UFO's, and the possibility that the person running the page is the product of secret government genetic engineering experiments involving "all of the above". It's... complicated.
EDIT:
Welp ,that took about as long as I expected. ROFL.
Somehow, it remind me of the Studio Ghibli anime Pom Poko, centering around the theme of the expansion of the Tokyo forcing Japanese Racoon to adopt human life.
Could domestication happened simple because we human expand too much?
It's interesting that there was no mention of the "cuteness" collection of traits that we find in common among infants of various species: short noses, big foreheads, and so forth.
but are they edible though? I mean if they were domesticated fully, what would we do with them? I like my dogs thank you, ain't no way I'm having a coon for a pet.
Despite no one actually mentioning the white tr*sh cookbook ... I do not see the point behind raising racoons for food. They do NOT taste like chicken. How do you think your dogs would taste?
I like your dogs too, and ain't no way I would disrespect them... Pets are not food sources. But a coon.. . They seem nice enough until they fight over food ... Then they become _ <- insert unfavoroable political party.
Apparently coons used to be quite a popular delicacy in the south once upon a time. Dogs are predators, which is a very primal reason I could never imagine eating one. I've eaten bear, and it tasted terrible. Come to think of it, every predator tastes terrible. But the racoon is an omnivorous scavenger. I must admin I'm coon curious now. :)
People have been trying to make the house raccoon a thing: https://old.reddit.com/r/raccoons
From what I remember spending time on this topic, raccoons need super challenging locks as toys and TONS of engagement from their keepers because they get bored easily and bored raccoons == ultra destructive raccoons. Also, rabies.
They're pretty great pets. We had one for a while when I was a kid. Its mom got run over and we nursed it and raised it for a few months. Instinctively used the same litter box as the cats. Hung out on the couch sitting on my shoulder watching TV. Friendly and playful. Would follow people around and play with toys.
The biggest challenge is that they basically have hands. He would climb up the kitchen cabinets, grab a box of cereal, open it up and sit there eating out of it like a toddler.
We only had him for a few months before reintroducing him to the woods behind the house. I've wanted a pet raccoon again ever since.
A former girlfriend of mine had a picture of her mother holding a Raccoon. I asked her mother about it and she said that they lived out in the woods in Minnesota and they found it on the porch when it was a baby. The mother had died or something so they kinda raised it. It was free roaming in/out of the house but they could hold it and it would also get into their food. She mentioned one time it ate a bunch of mixed nuts...but didn't like one type so it left all those in the bowl. Another time it ate an entire pie...but left her one piece ("so she wouldn't get angry"). She did say it was never really a "pet"...more like a wild animal that sometimes acted like one. This would have been in the late 70s early 80s by my guess on her age in the pictures.
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I remember reading somewhere once that baby raccoons are actually quite cuddly and tame; but that when they go adolescence, they have a hormone shift that makes them aggressive enough to be unsuitable as a pet. In the story a woman who had raised a baby raccoon was attacked by it after it grew to a certain age.
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There's a Japanese anime from the '70s called something like "rascal the racoon", based on an American book, which tells the story of a kid with a pet raccoon.
I've wanted a pet raccoon since I saw this on TV in the '80s, and raccoons aren't even a thing in Europe :(
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My wife and I wish our country didn't have such restrictive biosecurity laws, because AWWW THEIR CUTE LITTLE HANDS....
(I mean, there's good reasons my country does have those laws, and I don't _really_ want to have a wild animal as a pet, but I kinda do.)
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best HN story ive read in a while. i want a raccoon that eating tinyfist-fuls of cereal steaight from the box it opened, watching TV
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"What do you think we have these wonderfully articulate fingers for? To scratch our asses?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqTt_jDDCio
What about the smell? I’ve experienced ferrets is why I’m asking.
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Family raised multiple raccoons over the years until wildlife rescue became more of a common thing you could call up. The garage was seemingly a hot spot for the occasional runt raccoon with closed eyes to be left behind.
They not only get bored they get very particular with who in the family they enjoy following. Which can cause even more havoc when someone gets upset the raccoon doesn't want to be around them. One particularly funny story was a customer's kid (Business was attached to the house) begged and cried to be let hold the raccoon. We all knew it was a bad idea but Grandpa caved to the customer's demands so the kid would shut up. The racoon gladly let me hand her over to the kid, crawled up on the kids shoulder and proceeded to shit from one shoulder to the other then immediately jump off and return to my shoulder to glare at the kid. Never again did we let anyone outside the family touch the raccoon until we gave her up to a local zoo for use in educational programs since she was fairly well trained to behave for treats.
Just make sure you know your state's laws and regulations very well. I had a friend in a mid-western state that was caring for a couple of babies when a tree fell and killed their mother. They were in contact with a licensed rescue to get them to them. The Dept. of Conservation caught wind and showed up at their house, took the animals, walked into their back yard with them and shot them on the spot.
Assuming you are starting with a wild raccoon, get one from a population that is not in the eastern parts of the US or Canada and rabies is unlikely.
Here in Washington state for example there have been no documented cases of rabies in any wild raccoon in at least 60 years. Same goes for all other wild terrestrial mammals here.
Rabies isn't the only disease to worry about here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baylisascaris_procyonis
Or, use extreme caution in handling the animal in the first few days.
Rabies is neither subtle, nor slow.
Bats, on the other hand...
Plus, there are vaccines to prevent it.
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Sometimes I I think people really underestimate the circumstances needed for domestication of a species to be successful. There's this conception of our human abilities as something that supersedes the way nature works and shape things the way we want, which might at least appear to be true in a lot of cases, but I don't think that domestication can work just because we happen to want it to.
The most coherent take I've read on it is that there actually needs to be an evolutionary advantage for the species in order for the domestication to work out, which means it's essentially something that needs to take place over generations. Raccoons being cute and fluffy might be a reason that we would like to have them around, but I think the larger question is whether there's a good enough reason for them to develop a lifestyle where they hang around indoors with humans. Putting it in terms of evolution also can help clarify why the personality characteristics you mention aren't a simple obstacle to overcome; the fact that they might be better off as a species in the long run if they could just immediately switch over to being a type of house pet like a cat or dog might not be enough if the path to that from where they are now requires significant "downward movement" from a local optimum in the short term for the adaptions start becoming more advantageous so that the can reach a higher optimum.
Jep, just have a look here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45964090
It astounds me, that government still doesn't want to kill say 20k of these invaders.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45965985
People can also get rabies, that doesn’t mean we ban babies or perform mass cullings.
If they were domesticated, you’d just get them vaccinated at the vet.
Just remember to remain wary of the cute ones.
> Raccoons are a rabies reservoir in the eastern United States, extending from Canada to Florida and as far west as the Appalachian Mountain range. Within these areas, 10% of raccoons that expose people or pets have rabies, making them one of the highest rabies-risks in the United States.
https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/php/protecting-public-health/inde...
> 10% of raccoons that expose people or pets have rabies
I don't understand the language of this quote. What does it mean for an animal to expose people?
It's an odd framing. Out of R_t total raccoons, R_e bite or scratch (potentially "expose") humans. R_e / 10 of those were carrying rabies. So it could be that raccoons almost never bite/scratch humans, such that the behavioral effects of rabies are a significant motivator. It also could be that raccoons bite/scratch humans all of the time, and a ton of those raccoons have rabies. The latter is scary, but the former is likely the truth.
I wonder if increased interactions between humans and raccoons will lead to a reduction in that 10% figure (more reasons to bite humans).
It's that it's not 10% of racoons have rabies, but 10% of the ones that expose people to a bite scratch etc. The reason the numbers aren't the same, significantly less than 10% of them have rabies, is mainly that rabies itself can make them more hostile etc., on top of if bitten by a racoon that is more symptomatic seeming you are much more likely to get it checked out.
An “exposure” in this instance to rabies would be physical contact - a bite, scratch, or from its saliva on an open wound for instance.
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you would think that 100% of racoons that expose people to rabies have rabies.
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I think the idea is that a raccoon you encounter is conditionwlly more likely to have rabies just based on the fact that you've encountered it. My understanding is that rabid racoons are less nocturnal and far less likely to feel the need to run or hide from humans.
It's possible they botched the grammar here a little, but my interpretation is saying that if you look at the group of raccoons that allow themselves to be exposed itself to a human or pet (rather than avoiding us, which is not that hard for them to do it they want), around 10% of them have rabies.
Is there something that makes raccoons different than say cats in terms of rabies?
Cats get vaccinated against rabies. I doubt there's one for racoons.
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Just in time to spread a really awful parasite. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/human-cases-of-racco... "severe, frequently fatal, infections of the eyes, organs, and central nervous system. Those who survive are often left with severe neurological outcomes, including blindness, paralysis, loss of coordination, seizures, cognitive impairments, and brain atrophy"
We treat deer for ticks, etc. A decade ago, I think we would have been smart enough to treat wild raccoons for this parasite, but the time of human domestication is over. In another decade, I expect humans will be marking their territories with feces again.
I, for one, am looking forward to that
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Yes. It's a nasty parasite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baylisascaris_procyonis
Raccoons while cute, smart, interesting, etc., should not be considered as pets as long as this parasite exists.
President Calvin Coolidge had a pet raccoon in the White House: https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2021/01/when-rebecca-the-raccoon-r...
> Oddly, tameness has also long been associated with traits such as a shorter face, a smaller head, floppy ears and white patches on fur—a pattern that Charles Darwin noted in the 1800s.
Hmm, so evolutionary pressure of existing around humans makes animals cuter.
I wonder why we find these features endearing?
I believe the main biological lever is retaining juvenile features as adults, physically as well as mentally (like with dogs). What we see as cute is an honest signal that they are more child-like: less aggressive, more trusting and pro-social.
I also think that this is the central cause of a wide variety of domestic/cute adaptations. There are too many separate features to believe that raccoons and dogs and cats and a dozen other species all select for these same elements independently.
I no longer have the book on hand, but read a few months ago that this correlation between juvenile traits and domestication was one of the main theses of Barrett's "Supernormal Stimuli" in Chapter 4. She cited a few studies of fox domestication [1], [2] and other works to support these theories.
[1]: https://courses.washington.edu/anmind/Trut%20on%20the%20Russ...
[2] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(05)...
animals werent kept as pets until recently - they were all (dogs, livestock etc, cats technically) working animals.
My guess: possibly co-evolution. The article subsequently describes the genetics behind things becoming cute - which would have been completely benign to our ancestors (the core of your question). However, those of our ancestors who completed domestication of these animals (by random chance) would have enjoyed more protection from predators, rodents, etc. Those of our ancestors who attempted to domesticate things without the mutations might have had bad companions at best, and would have been predated at worst. This would have provided evolutionary pressure to adopt animals that were showing early signs of domestication. What we call "cute" is merely "likely to cooperate with us."
Since humans associate cuteness with large eyes and small body size, nocturnal / twilight animals, like raccoons, sugar gliders, cats, squirrels, etc have a larger chance to be domesticated as pets.
Daytime, larger animals (e.g. sheep, goats, or even rabbits) have a larger chance to be domesticated as food.
We're programmed to take care of (human) babies. That's pretty fundamental to our species survival.
Those features activates the same areas of our brain that babies' faces activate.
Feeling that something is "cute" is the evolutionary way that our brain is using to make us care of our kids.
Put slightly differently, they look cute because we are all mammals and they are cute.
> I wonder why we find these features endearing
It's a side effect, evolution made sure we take care of our offspring.
I would bet on Paedomorphism, because we find babies and puppies cute.
Experiment in taming foxes that relied on a single principle of selecting animals that react to humans with least fear and aggression resulted also in those morphological changes. I think it's more about selecting animals that retain youthful curiosity and other traits into their adult life. Youthful morphological features just tag along.
Animal Auditions: Cute vs. Food - Denis Leary
https://youtu.be/IZBAtd9rty8
Perhaps a combination of adaptableness, small size, prodigious reproduction, and cuteness saved some species from being wiped out whereas other species didn't fare so well once humans arrived and transformed their territory. Adapt to urban encroachment or face extinction.
Reminds me of signs like "Rabbits for sale: pets or food"
I thought it's because adrenalin and melatonin are produced in the same brain region, or something like that.
I've heard that the same process of domestication towards "cuteness" has been outlined in human evolution too.
Larger head-size relative to the body, larger eyes, smaller jaws and noses, longer limbs, etc.
Interesting parallels across species towards less aggression, greater pro-social behavior, more physical traits that shout "trust me, I'm harmless."
Almost like pro-social, intelligent team co-operation is a huge advantage compared to solo predatory behavior.
If dogs started out as wolves and ended up as English bulldogs, imagine how stupid raccoons will eventually look.
One of my favorite memes: https://share.google/sQw5gZ6O4wQspS61P
Thank you for this, I needed that.
Most cat breeds still look more or less like their wild relatives.
Most dogs, arguably, too. But there are French bulldogs, dachshunds, and pugs.
Among domestic cats, there are Persian cats and Sphinx cats.
And then you have the fossa.
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Cats aren't really domesticated. Out of many, many cat species we just found one that's well aligned with humans and it spread with humans to the whole world. No other cat species plays well with humans and none shows any signs of domestication.
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Have you seen short legged cats?
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Probably something like a koala bear
Well this gave me some fun ideas for AI image generation. There goes the rest of my afternoon, thanks!
Luckily there are still the extra snouty breeds like Belgian shepherds and various sighthounds.
And pugs? What would a pug raccoon look like?
Racoons, even city's racoons are terrible beasts. Sure, they are friendly when they aren't upset; Take a treat away from the hands of the sweetest racoon and it will either pounce on you to retrieve it, scream bloody murder, or pounce and slash at you until you retreat.
Racoons, especially in the city, will kill and eat an older housecat or easy to access domestic chickens without hesitation.
Declawing them helps, but nature happens when a declawed racoon feels a call to roam and is outmatched by even a small hawk or possum.
To be fair, if you take something away from me that's mine, there's not much difference between the raccoon and myself.
You should work on that.
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I have a bunch of racoons in my yard every night. A year ago, on some whim, they decided to rip open the less than secure but 8 ft in the air vent grating for the chicken coop.
Some chickens made it, most in fact. But playtime involved ripping the heads off 3 of them.
They can be quite sinister.
Raccoons have been living literally inside of houses for centuries.
One was kept as a pet in Jamestown Virginia in the 1600s. Another lived in the White House in the 1900s. Surely, not a decade has passed between have there been NO domesticated raccoons in the US? If living near humans changes animals, that started at least 25,000 years ago here in North America. Not recently.
My neighbors had a pet raccoon growing up. It lived inside but would come and go.
The people who wrote this article seem out of touch with the topic they chose to pretend to be experts about?
> Surely, not a decade has passed between have there been NO domesticated raccoons in the US?
An animal of wild parentage that was raised by humans is tame but not domesticated. So no, there's aren't really domesticated racoons, only tame ones.
Domestication is a process that takes many generations. It is a selective breeding process more than anything else. Animals that are 1 generation away from wild ancestors aren't domesticated, by definition.
And the last category is feral animals, "that live in the wild but are descended from domesticated individuals.".
> The people who wrote this article seem out of touch with the topic they chose to pretend to be experts about?
This is quickly becoming the norm for experts, unfortunately. I keep seeing more an more people with educational expertise in something that they have zero hands-on or practical experience with.
I remember being at a social event once and chatting with someone who was a business professor at any Ivy League university. Making small talk, I asked him which companies he'd worked at, and he told me that he had gone the academic track and started teaching during and after getting his PhD (in exactly what I don't remember). I remember being stunned that students would pay over $60k a year to learn about business from someone who'd never worked for or started a business.
> I remember being stunned that students would pay over $60k a year to learn about business from someone who'd never worked for or started a business.
Were you stunned that your parents paid lots of money to put you in front of educators from kindergarten to college?
Why would you restrict yourself to learning from one businessman when you can get learn from an educator who has distilled the experiences of hundreds if not thousands of business people?
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Wait till you find out lots of computer science PhDs can't program.
Did it say otherwise?
It primarily says they can now observe physical changes associated with domestication.
Also, keeping a wild animal as a pet does not domesticate it.
Individual animals can be tame. Only entire populations can be domesticated. Two different things.
That doesn't mean the process is happening naturally as asserted. For instance, wild black wolves in the US got this trait from hybridization with domesticated dogs.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2903542/
I think you’re mistaking slight natural adaption for domestication, and taking domestication for granted. Go into nature and try and train a wild wolf. Good luck! You can’t.
Domestication, in the way that we see having happened with dogs (and cattle, and chickens) takes a really long time.
We consider cats “domesticated” and yet demonstrably they are not. If they were much bigger, they’d eat us, and if set into wild, nearly all household cats immediately revert to feral.
I owned five ferrets once. Loved them so much, but came to the realization that there are animals that should be pets and animals that maybe shouldn’t (yet). I think we have many, many more generations before raccoons are at the same level as dogs.
Ironic choice: ferrets are a wholly domesticated species of weasel, bred for rat hunting. They are domesticated, by any reasonable standard I'm aware of, as are cats.
I'm sorry your experience with cats hasn't been as pleasant, but I assure you they are much more domesticated than chickens - which you seem to have little experience with. Screw eating us - they'll eat each other.
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Dogs can easily become feral too, feral dogs will often attack humans, and given the opportunity have been known to eat people.
Foxes too, generally. The average temperament tends to include curiosity, playfulness, and wariness but not moral fear of humans. People keep them as household pets so I'd call that domesticable. An experiment to speed up the process of fox domestication was undertaken. [0] Foxes tend to not be like almost all wolves (and many wolfdogs) which are reserved, not prone to social openness, and hard to read like American Akitas which makes them dangerous by dominance challenging, miscommunication, and untrustworthiness.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
Fox urine reeks. You don't want to live anywhere near that.
And I remember reading that they have awful BO naturally
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What is "moral fear of humans"?
As crepuscular animals, they are very, very afraid of humans.
from when a racoon is born, they are told that humans are evil. its obviously not true but the stereotype persists
I want to see an intelligence-optimized domesticated raccoon breed, like the raccoon equivalent of a border collie
Get a pet rat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA
(I'll convince you all to get pet rats eventually!!! :))
Breed a rat with a furry tail, and you will overcome all resistance. That hairless tail is creepy - and I say that as an admirer of pet rats.
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That's a pretty clever rat!
Imagine trying to keep an animal like that out of food it's not supposed to have (to include fish tanks). The dang things would probably learn to pick locks with their cute little hands.
This is precisely why I think exceptionally smart animals should never be pets: octopus, corvids, raccoons…
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Domestication often involves lower intelligence. Particularly for farm animals.
Consider the statement above that tame raccoons need "TONS of engagement from their keepers because they get bored easily". Breeding that out means essentially a less curious, more complacent animal. Cows and sheep that easily figure out how to escape their paddocks are a liability.
Which category do you think is more clever: Wolf and coyote; or pug and chihuahua?
dog breeds considered "clever" often more closely resemble their wild ancestors. And they are often not "easy" breeds to own.
Skunks apparently make great pets (but need to have their stink glands surgically extracted), the pitch is smart like a cat but faithful like dogs
I think dogs in general are smarter than cats.
Dogs are certainly better at looking intelligent. I think dogs, being a more social animal, are more eager to please, and so are willing to be trained.
Cats can vary wildly. One of my cats seems dumb as a box of rocks and haven't even grasped the idea of object permanence. If she's tracking a laser, and I move it around a corner, she can't figure out where it went. She goes from intense staring and tracking to standing up and looking around, confused. When I bring the laser back around the corner, she's instantly back to squatting and tracking it.
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Dogs and cats have different modalities for intelligence.
Dogs are social animals that have evolved to be human companions a long time ago. This is why they are "trainable" and, therefore, seem more intelligent.
Cats are not; they are extremely good hunters that by and large tolerate humans in exchange for easy access to food and water. You can't really train them, but they will find hiding spots you didn't even know existed and you will NEVER have problems with mice with one around.
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> I think dogs in general are smarter than cats.
This is exactly what a dog would say.
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Are they as randy in real life as Pepe lePew?
Only towards black cats with a white stripe.
Removing the scent glands of a skunk is considered about as ethical as declawing a cat. It just isn't really done anymore. Maybe 30 years ago...
I don't really understand this. Isn't it about as surgically invasive as getting a pet spayed?
Does the scent gland do anything more than just stinking? For a cat, removing the claws literally removes bones from them. It limits their mobility and hurts like hell.
(Not that I want a pet skunk. Just curious as to why it's unethical)
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I think I know one or two family members who have been aiding and abetting this evolutionary process
> “I’d love to take those next steps and see if our trash pandas in our backyard are really friendlier than those out in the countryside,” she says.
Would they have to measure "biological" friendliness, comparing lab raised countryside-descended and city-descended raccoons? Domesticated animals can be very unfriendly. Feral cats for example.
It'll be interesting to see what their methodology is. Trapping tends to piss off any raccoon regardless of urban vs rural.
Honestly, measuring the distance to which a single raccoon approaches is a pretty good proxy. City birds are self-domesticating right now; wrens willing to be on the same table as a human get more fries to eat. (And I've actually used this metric on them: the same one or two reliably get closer than the others.)
Oh right. But how do they taste? Asking for a friend.
Not great. My late dog and I agreed on that (although he had his raw, after freezing).
The raw meat is even smelly.
Edit: Dexter did say that, after a few days of aging in the forest, the flavor improved considerably. He was even willing to share.
So Kassel, Germany, may have hope to be less harassed in the future?
FYI, Kassel kinda is the so-called capitol of raccoons. 30k+ raccoons life there, according to estimates.
I certainly would not want to live there. It is crazy how these animals flock together and invade properties. And they aren't shy anymore due to the reverse positive reinforcement they receive by not killing them.
Yes, it is of course in Germany forbidden to kill an invading predatory species - even on your property. This is Germany 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DJXsI_A5DU
https://www.kassel.de/buerger/sicherheit_und_ordnung/tiersch...
Toronto, Canada is hands down the raccoon capital of the world. Something like 100k raccoons live in the city.
I can’t get my head around how such big animals manage to live all around us in such densely populated place. I suppose it helps that they are cartoonishly adorable.
But they are increasingly getting really, really big. It’s just a matter of time before the chonker living in my neighbour’s shed bullies me out of my house.
All you need to know about Toronto is that the generational effort to build a raccoon-resistant trash can has failed every time. They're unstoppable beasts!
Example: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/raccoon-resistant-bin...
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Kassel is under 200k people, with ~100 raccoons/km² though!
Curiously, that raccoon population was established legally and intentionally in the 30s to bolster local fur production; later efforts to eradiacte the animals (for being pests from an agriculture perspective) have been given up.
Damage to local ecosystems seems fortunately pretty limited, even though the raccoons are highly successful and spreading.
> Yes, it is of course in Germany forbidden to kill an invading predatory species - even on your property. This is Germany 2025.
This is blatantly false.
The nandus that are living in the north can and are being killed for exactly this reason: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandu#Wilde_Population_in_Nord... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_rhea#Distribution_and_... for a shorter paragraph in English)
I guess there is a more nuanced reason for not killing the raccoons in Kassel.
The second link parent posted literally explains it, which makes their "oh no, German in 2025 so broken" quite puzzling:
> Es gibt viel zu viele Waschbären, um mit den erlaubten jagdlichen Mitteln im städtischen Umfeld eine nachhaltige Bestandsreduzierung bewirken zu können, denn Waschbären können hohe Verlustraten durch vermehrte Fortpflanzung ausgleichen. Je mehr Waschbären getötet werden, umso mehr Jungtiere kommen nach. Die vielen Jungtiere machen aber unter Umständen mehr Probleme als die Alten, und die Gefahr einer Ausbreitung von Krankheiten und Parasiten wird durch die abwandernden Jungtiere erhöht statt vermindert.
> There are too many raccoons for permitted hunting methods within an urban context to have a sufficient effect on population numbers as raccoons react to high death rates with increased breeding. The more raccoons are killed, the more young are born. The large amount of young raccoons can create more problems than older animals, and the danger of spreading disease and parasites is increased as young animals roam from established territories.
tl;dr: you're not allowed to just randomly shoot shit in urban areas because duh, the population is too large for trapping, and the raccoons are just gonna fuck more and then go a-wandering, making everything worse.
> 30k+ raccoons life there, according to estimates.
Along with 200k+ of the most violent species on the planet: humans.
> Yes, it is of course in Germany forbidden to kill an invading predatory species - even on your property. This is Germany 2025.
Raccoons can and are hunted in Germany, what are you talking about? The federal laws regarding hunting don't mention them and thus allow states to decide. I haven't checked every states local laws and executive orders, but I'm not aware of any that don't allow hunting raccoons.
I personally know at least one person who has a pet racoon. They've been raising it since it was a baby or pup(?).
It's pretty interesting to see their Instagram stories.
Would be cool if it eventually leads to a Cambrian explosion of raccoon varieties after generations of breeding desirable traits.
For thousands of years after domestication there were only a handful of dog breeds; hounds, sheepdogs etc, which were bred for their utility rather than appearance. It’s only in the last couple of hundred years that dog breeds have exploded.
They might even become intelligent!
Amusing, albeit mostly irrelevant, sidebar...
On Facebook, there's been this running gag/joke/meme/whatever going for at least the last year, where anytime the official North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission page posts anything, a large portion of the comments quickly turn into a discussion of the merits (or lack thereof) of pet raccoons[1].
I don't know exactly how it started. Somebody innocently asked "How do I get a permit for a pet raccoon?" and the page replied "You can't, they are illegal in NC" or something prosaic like that I imagine. But it became a big "thing" and now raccoon talk is everywhere. The page controllers play along with it, which is part of why it's kept going so long I guess. But sometimes they'll get semi-serious and post something like
"Look, all joking aside, the reason pet raccoons are not allowed is because no matter how friendly raccoons look, they are wild animals, not domesticated, and they can be a hazard to you, and your family and <blah, etc, etc>".
Soooo... I'm just waiting to see somebody post this very article in a comment on that page with a note saying "Suck it, NCWRC!" (all in a spirit of good fun, of course).
[1]: or one or more of another of a small set of topics, including flounder, pet alligators, armadillos, UFO's, and the possibility that the person running the page is the product of secret government genetic engineering experiments involving "all of the above". It's... complicated.
EDIT:
Welp ,that took about as long as I expected. ROFL.
https://fogbeam.com/racoons_domesticating.png
https://archive.ph/GLiI5
Somehow, it remind me of the Studio Ghibli anime Pom Poko, centering around the theme of the expansion of the Tokyo forcing Japanese Racoon to adopt human life.
Could domestication happened simple because we human expand too much?
I can't imagine it's easy to domesticate a trash panda. They are also devious little creatures, way smarter than you expect.
It's interesting that there was no mention of the "cuteness" collection of traits that we find in common among infants of various species: short noses, big foreheads, and so forth.
https://www.bbcearth.com/news/the-code-for-cuteness
Just name coyotes to the AKC, would you?
but are they edible though? I mean if they were domesticated fully, what would we do with them? I like my dogs thank you, ain't no way I'm having a coon for a pet.
Despite no one actually mentioning the white tr*sh cookbook ... I do not see the point behind raising racoons for food. They do NOT taste like chicken. How do you think your dogs would taste?
I like your dogs too, and ain't no way I would disrespect them... Pets are not food sources. But a coon.. . They seem nice enough until they fight over food ... Then they become _ <- insert unfavoroable political party.
> How do you think your dogs would taste?
Weird question. My preconceptions don't overrule my tongue. (And the answer is: hairy. Very hairy.)
Apparently coons used to be quite a popular delicacy in the south once upon a time. Dogs are predators, which is a very primal reason I could never imagine eating one. I've eaten bear, and it tasted terrible. Come to think of it, every predator tastes terrible. But the racoon is an omnivorous scavenger. I must admin I'm coon curious now. :)
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Edible, yes.
Tasty, no.
talk to me when we start domesticating bears!
no paywall: https://archive.ph/GLiI5
Saw two of them dead on the side of the road this morning in the stretch of a couple miles, that will drive some evolution.
No, it won't. Rabies might.