Comment by nunez
3 months 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.
They have a lot in common with housecats, except that they are more clever. Decades ago we heard a crunch crunch sound from the rear mudroom. We looked and saw a raccoon reaching in and eating dry cat out of a box with the cat looking on enviously.
Camping I heard a crunching sound, looked out from the tent to see a racoon helping itself to granola in the back of the car. Lock your doors.
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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One of the hallmarks of domestication is retaining pre-adolescent behaviour in adulthood, for example dogs barking.
Puberty blockers?
If we can set aside ethics, it would be interesting if the result was a truly good life long pet. They are so smart.
Well, that sounds a lot like humans offsprings
Wombats are the same. Cute and cuddly when little and one day just snap.
I've heard the same thing from my mother, whose uncle had a baby raccoon as a pet. Once he got older he became mean and would yank on her hair for no reason.
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
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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)
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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
sounds very similar to a stoner-roommate to be honest. a bit chaotic, but peaceful. hungry, and bored.
"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.
I can't remember. We had ferrets too, and they smelled. I don't recall the raccoon having a strong smell. Maybe they smell when they're older.
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.
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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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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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.