Comment by nunez
16 hours ago
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.
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.
Judging by the murderous sounds you hear all night here in the summer, I would not want to be cornered in a dark alley by a gang of adolescent raccoons.
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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 :(
And the anime was so popular it led to raccoons being imported en masse to Japan and becoming an invasive species when their owners released them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascal_the_Raccoon#Impact
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Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era. I had that book as a kid. There was a live action Disney film of it; didn't know about the anime version. Neat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascal_(book)
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Racoons are invading the north east of France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2ijwZROb6g ; they are exotic invasive species: a female get 10 babies per year, and there is no predator
Well at least in Germany they are a thing - a quick google search says there's a population of >1 million raccoons in Germany.
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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.)
on the other side - if not for these laws, somebody would have produced a pet racoon breed in several generations, smth like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox#/media... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox)
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
sounds very similar to a stoner-roommate to be honest. a bit chaotic, but peaceful. hungry, and bored.
What about the smell? I’ve experienced ferrets is why I’m asking.
"What do you think we have these wonderfully articulate fingers for? To scratch our asses?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqTt_jDDCio
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.
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.
If you were talking about the rabies vaccine, for humans, that’s not really a normal vaccine for people to get. It’s not like getting the flu vaccine or the chickenpox vaccine or others, and they shouldn’t be lumped into that same category.
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Yes, but the rabies vaccine is not really for "prevention" (with some exceptions, before someone comes "ackschually" here), more like post-exposure
Because it sucks less than dying of Rabies and boy you don't want to know how low the bar is here
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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.
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.