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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
That's a recessive trait that is fatal if they get two copies of it. When left to their devices they'll return to being normal cats in a few generations.
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 mean, you're removing part of a living animal for human convenience. If the ethical issue isn't obvious I don't know what to tell you.
The practice has been banned in the UK for almost 20 years, under the exact same laws as ban declawing cats. It's unnecessary mutilation with no medical justification.
We do a lot of bad things to animals for human convenience. Including forced breeding and raising them to be slaughtered.
The ethics is murky to me because I assume the procedure doesn't cause lasting pain and allows the animals to be pampered pets. The alternative is they are kept wild.
There are plenty of quite happy non-descented skunks out there.
They don’t just go around spraying. It’s a defense mechanism - pretty much their only one as a matter of fact. Tame pets are very unlikely to spray anyone not trying to hurt them.
We neuter male cats so they don’t spray piss everywhere and spay female cats so they don’t go into heat and scream incessantly to be let outside.
Both procedures seem slightly more invasive than removing a scent gland in a skunk, given that it removes the sex organs that secrete hormones and changes their behavior for the rest of their life.
It’s possible that a skunk gets anxious when it tries to spray and nothing comes out, I can’t say I’m an expert in skunk behavior, it just seems less invasive than spaying or neutering to me.
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.
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
I don't understand the language of this quote. What does it mean for an animal to expose people?
I wonder if increased interactions between humans and raccoons will lead to a reduction in that 10% figure (more reasons to bite humans).
Hmm, so evolutionary pressure of existing around humans makes animals cuter.
I wonder why we find these features endearing?
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)...
Daytime, larger animals (e.g. sheep, goats, or even rabbits) have a larger chance to be domesticated as food.
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.
It's a side effect, evolution made sure we take care of our offspring.
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.
Among domestic cats, there are Persian cats and Sphinx cats.
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?
It primarily says they can now observe physical changes associated with domestication.
Also, keeping a wild animal as a pet does not domesticate it.
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.
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?
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
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.
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.
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)
The practice has been banned in the UK for almost 20 years, under the exact same laws as ban declawing cats. It's unnecessary mutilation with no medical justification.
The ethics is murky to me because I assume the procedure doesn't cause lasting pain and allows the animals to be pampered pets. The alternative is they are kept wild.
They don’t just go around spraying. It’s a defense mechanism - pretty much their only one as a matter of fact. Tame pets are very unlikely to spray anyone not trying to hurt them.
Both procedures seem slightly more invasive than removing a scent gland in a skunk, given that it removes the sex organs that secrete hormones and changes their behavior for the rest of their life.
It’s possible that a skunk gets anxious when it tries to spray and nothing comes out, I can’t say I’m an expert in skunk behavior, it just seems less invasive than spaying or neutering to me.
(I'll convince you all to get pet rats eventually!!! :))
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.
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
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.