On top of all its physical cuteness, the raccoon can exhibit behavior that’s utterly charming—playful, mischievous, and opportunistically friendly, a cross between a super-smart kitten and a dog, but with a wild edge that makes us feel somehow graced by the animal’s attention. Often, raccoon sympathizers have at one point had their emotions solidified by a personal encounter with a raccoon—petting, feeding, or playing with someone’s pet, a zoo animal, or a tamed backyard raccoon. It’s little wonder so many people are inspired to feed raccoons and encourage their presence.
The great naturalist Rachel Carson was not immune and cooed over her doctor’s pet raccoon in letters to friends. She loved the then-popular book about that “mischievous but lovable raccoon” Rascal, and she recommended it widely. My own friend David is convinced (I’m not sure how genuinely) that he was accepted to Harvard because he listed the book Raccoons Are the Brightest People alongside The Odyssey on the application’s “recently read” page, giving him an eccentric edge. But raccoons are not reducible to their cuteness, not by any stretch, and trying to do so diminishes both their intelligence and ours.
Radically opposed to the raccoons-are-cute folk—so radically that sometimes it is difficult to believe that we humans are all one species with the same basic neural pathways at work—are those who hate raccoons with a passion that I can barely fathom. I live in Seattle, a bubble of eco-peace and nature love, and most of the people I know love raccoons, feel neutral about them, never think about them because they never see them, or hate them benignly—that is, they consider them pests but would never actively seek to harm one. So in researching this bestiary, I was a bit surprised to find how common it is to absolutely vilify these common urban animals. Following are representative comments gleaned from blogs that have brought up the subject of backyard-raccoon nuisances:
Poison them and let them die a painful death.
Solution = The Marlin 981T. Sells for about $175. Add a scope for around 35-40 more and a brick of .22lr.
In response to the fact that hunting is illegal in the city—
Is it still technically hunting if you just shoot them and drop them in the trash?
Raccoons are vile creatures. They haven’t a redeeming quality. A 12 or 20 with #2 buck is the weapon of choice.
No redeeming quality. Of all the comments, this is the most remarkable to me. Raccoons have stolen my shoes, killed my chickens, deflated my pool, strewn my garbage, interrupted my sleep, defoliated my pond lily. They have dragged my husband’s bike shorts off the clothesline, pulled the padding out of the bum, and spread it about the yard (why?). They have disemboweled my favorite pond fish, dropped cherry pits on my backyard tent while I was trying to sleep, and stolen all of the apples off my newly fruiting columnar apple the day before I was going to pick them. (A common complaint—raccoons have a knack for defruiting trees the night before a human plans to show up with the basket. It seems uncanny, as if they do this just to thwart us, but, like many wild-fruit foragers, raccoons are attuned to weather cues that signal a turn from almost ripe to almost too ripe, and they respond to these cues in their own foraging.)* Even so—even with all this raccoon badness in my own life and yard—it is difficult to imagine a statement such as that one. After all, like them or hate them, you have to admit that raccoons are objectively beautiful animals, with thick, earth-colored fur, and markings that strike observers with their vitality and uniqueness. They are smart. They have a long, rich history alongside humans in the Americas. The females are careful, tender, watchful mothers. Raccoons are industrious, playful, and affectionate, both with one another and often with humans (Sioux children, especially girls, loved to keep raccoons as pets).
It’s true: Raccoons can wreak some serious havoc. They remove garbage-can lids and scatter the trash. They come in through the cat door, eat the pet food, and raise a wild rumpus in the kitchen. They remove loose roof shakes and pad into the attic, sometimes giving birth to even more raccoons there. They can undo locks (and remember for years how they did it) and untie knots. They can tie knots. When we try to chase them out of the yard, they stare at us like teenagers, as if they couldn’t possibly care less, and when they don’t leave, they begin to scare us. Occasionally, they have a run-in with a domestic cat that goes badly for the cat. Sometimes they have rabies (though in all of human-raccoon history, only one human is known to have died from a rabid-raccoon bite).
Thrown into this fray of wildness, cuteness, human love, human hate, interesting behavior, mischievous behavior, and downright damaging behavior is an enormous corpus of raccoon lore—stories that are oft repeated, widely believed, but largely untrue, rivaling even the Beaver entry in the Aberdeen Bestiary. Among them: Raccoons are nocturnal, so those seen during the day are rabid. (While raccoons are mainly nocturnal, they often amble during the day, especially females with young; they forage during the day to avoid their mainly nocturnal predators). Raccoons are rodents. (They are not even closely related to rodents; they are procyonids, with ringtails and coatimundi as their closest relatives and weasels and bears as distant relatives in the same order). Raccoons kill cats. (Well, they usually don’t—not unless they are cornered and threatened by the cat, or the cat poses a threat to a raccoon’s kits.) Raccoons have no shoulders, and that’s why they can fit into tight places like attics. (This is a good one—raccoons are vertebrate mammals, with scapulae and shoulders just like the rest of us vertebrate mammals. They have narrow shoulders, and their bodies are smaller than they appear because they are so furry, so they can squeeze through a cat door, but they can’t miraculously fit into impossibly small places.)
It is curious that such a common animal is so widely misunderstood—that most urban dwellers make it to adulthood without a basic sense of the natural history of a very common wild neighbor; that this decidedly nonhuman being has been limited to the entirely human categories of pet/friend or vermin/enemy.
This tendency on our part to anthropomorphize raccoons is surely based on their physical characteristics. The front foot, the “hand,” has five toes, and the first and last are shorter than the other three. Though not truly an opposable thumb, the first digit can be placed against the center three, making the paw remarkably dexterous. Maybe more than any other wild track, a raccoon track with toes spread looks like a tiny human hand. The back paw is longer, also five-toed, shaped very much like a human foot. The raccoon balances on the back paws by putting pressure toward the outer surfaces as humans and bears do—a plantigrade stance, as the trackers call it—leaving, again, a humanlike impression in any receptive substrate. Raccoon paws, though, exceed human hands in their practiced ability to gain information about their surroundings. The soles of the paws are both highly innervated and well protected with layers of thick, leathery skin. Like antennae on an insect or whiskers on a cat, the sensitive feet of the raccoon allow it to gather information while remaining alert to its surroundings. Watch raccoons as they eat berries or manipulate and consume other food. They rarely have to look down—it’s as if the world is written in a kind of raccoon Braille. When raccoons appear to be dousing their food or washing their hands in water, they are more likely softening the surface of their front paws to increase sensitivity for the delicate work of eating or foraging.
Names for the raccoon across North American cultures and tribal lines have largely followed this human fascination with tasks raccoons perform with their hand-paws. Our modern English word raccoon is adopted from the Algonquian word for the animal, ah-rah-koon-em, or “those who rub, scrub, and scratch.” There is also the Aztec mapachitl, “the ones who take everything in their hands”; the Chippewa aasebun, “they pick up things”; Choctaw shauii, “the graspers”; Ofo-Sioux at-cha, “one who touches the things”; Lenape nachenum, “they use hands for tools”; Delaware wtakalinch, “one very clever with its fingers”; Kiowa seip-kuat, “pulls out crayfish with hands”; and this list goes on and on.
Raccoon Feet
Raccoons have beautiful feet tha
t make distinctive tracks. Observing the delicate toes in a raccoon track, one can easily see how raccoons are able to perform so many complex tasks with such dexterity. Raccoon tracks are easy to identify, with five long toes on both front and hind feet, and nail dots often visible, especially on the front feet. The toes may be spread or close together, depending on the substrate and on the animal’s activity at the time the track was left.
The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus was given a pet raccoon named Sjupp as a gift from the crown prince of Sweden, who had traveled to the New World. After his long overseas passage from New Sweden, Delaware, to Linnaeus’s garden in Uppsala, Sjupp was himself treated like royalty by Linnaeus, who wrote that although the raccoon would eat almost anything, “what he liked best were eggs, almonds, raisins, sugared cakes, sugar, and fruit of every kind.” Sjupp learned to search the naturalist’s pockets for treats. Linnaeus loved the raccoon and played with him every day until he climbed over a fence and was killed by a dog. True to form, Linnaeus gathered Sjupp’s limp body and plunked it down on his dissecting table, and though his examination was fittingly detailed and scientific, it was sprinkled with affectionate recollections of the raccoon’s playfulness and intelligence. Based on his observations of Sjupp, Linnaeus gave the raccoon the Latinized name Ursus lotor, “hand-washing bear.” The modern term, Procyon lotor, drops the misleading Ursus, in the name of scientific accuracy, but retains the emphasis on washing paws.
Besides having hands, raccoons wear masks—a potent psycho-mythical symbol, evoking a sense of disguise, duplicity, ambiguity, equivocation, shadow, mystery, and of course thievery. The raccoon mask is so convincing, it is easy to forget that it is not actually a mask, just a band of fur that happens to be black for adaptive reasons. Like the rings on the tail, the black band of fur across a raccoon’s face provides the animal with a kind of camouflage known as disruptive coloration. Many animals hide from predators by blending into the landscape with their earthen-colored fur and skin, and we can see this in the predominantly earth-toned fur of the raccoon’s body. But another evolutionary strategy involves the breaking up of the familiar animal body-head-tail outline with stripes, which keeps a predator that is just glancing at a landscape from recognizing an animal as a complete form. Many animals employ disruptive coloration: think of a killdeer, its two black bands across its chest. The stripes would seem to make the birds more obvious, but when on their ground-scrape nests, they become nearly invisible. The black color also reduces glare, important for an animal like a raccoon that traverses edges, coming out of the dark forest into the bright grasses, sometimes at night, sometimes in daylight. Lots of animals have black masks for the same reason—chickadees, cedar waxwings, peregrine falcons, pandas, professional football players.
In the case of raccoons and other midsize carnivores, newer research suggests that the masks might also be a hands-off signal to larger predators. The related coati, as well as badgers and wolverines—all masked animals of about the same size—share territories with larger carnivores, such as coyotes or cougars, but they are not prey for these animals in the expected numbers. In a real fight, the smaller animal is likely to lose, but because these smaller species possess a ferocity disproportionate to their size, the larger animal is unlikely to come out unscathed. Such aposematic color signals are more common in other taxa—think of insects like ladybugs or amphibians like rough-skinned newts that signal their own toxicity to would-be nibblers with their bright red coloration. In the same way, some researchers suggest, the masks of raccoons and their ilk may signal to predators that the meal might not be worth the trouble.
I am convinced that both the raccoon’s humanlike feet and its fur mask, symbols for us of action and power, play a large part in our misascribing a certain intent to raccoon activity. It is difficult but meaningful to remember: Raccoons are not actually doing anything to us. Their seeming mischievousness is not directed toward us, our world, our interests, our lives. They do not come to vex us, or steal from us, or even entertain us. They come to do the things they need to do as raccoons—find food, play (an evolutionarily complex and essential activity shared by the most intelligent animals), shelter themselves, and feel safe in an increasingly complex and difficult world. Our best response will involve the cultivation of a tolerance for the uncertain, a mature and openhearted vigilance.
Recently, in our online community forum the West Seattle Blog, a neighbor wrote about “Urban Super Raccoons versus Pets.” In the post, she neatly summed up the essential elements of urban human-raccoon conflict. She told the story of waking to find six raccoons running wild and messy through her kitchen after they’d come in through the cat door. She shooed them out, but in subsequent weeks, one of them attacked her large Maine coon cat and her neighbor’s aging dog, and it eventually killed a stray cat she had taken in and named Jasmine. She wrote:
My neighbor (who is still suffering from the injury she received trying to save her dog) watched in horror from her deck as a raccoon dragged a howling Jasmine by the scruff of the neck over into the Sealth construction project.
What can be done? These are not typical raccoons. They are urban super raccoons who are opportunists. The massive construction projects on all sides of our neighborhood have pushed them into our immediate area. The Sealth construction project is particularly problematic with piles of trash all over the ground. Please advise. These animals have to go!
Of course, all raccoons are opportunists, urban or rural. All raccoons adapt quickly to change; they den anywhere, eat anything. But the idea that urban raccoons are somehow an über-variety is partly true. In general, urban raccoons are slightly but measurably larger than rural and wilderness raccoons, probably because of their diet, which includes the junk food of human refuse. And the blog writer is also correct, on the whole, about the cause of increased raccoon presence—habitat encroachment coupled with scattered garbage containing food. The stories of animal attacks are, however, unusual. Raccoons, even human-habituated urban raccoons, rarely attack pets or people outright. They stand their ground and make guttural sounds in a way that strikes us as menacing, but in most cases, they avoid physical attack. There are exceptions. Like most wild mammals, raccoons will become physically defensive when cornered. This is particularly true if the raccoon’s young are near and is a fact containing a lesson: If you have raccoons in your house or yard, open the doors or gates and scoot them out from behind. Never let them feel trapped. Raccoons will also defend themselves if they are threatened or attacked by another animal. Wildlife-removal expert Sean Met conjectures that domestic animals see their fenced yards as their own territory, but raccoons think of fences as simple obstacles to climb over, which can be an invitation to conflict. Given the raccoon’s scrappy wildness, a small dog or cat is not likely to fare well if a raccoon-pet confrontation turns physical (though larger dogs regularly kill raccoons in urban settings, as with Linnaeus’s Sjupp). “That’s a lot of animal,” state wildlife biologist Christ Anderson says of a provoked raccoon.
Across the street from me lives a big fluff of a white cat, and one of our neighborhood raccoons regularly patters up this cat’s driveway and along the side fence in an attempt to get to the backyard. The cat languishes broadly in the narrow entrance to the side yard, and whenever the raccoon—a very big raccoon—gets near the cat, he stops and labors back and forth between his front paws, pondering, as raccoons do. Eventually he musters his nerve and moves slowly ahead, giving the cat the widest possible berth, at which point the cat, every time, stretches a long paw and swats the raccoon on his nose.
One of my favorite raccoon stories comes from Sean Met, who told me about a call he’d received from a man who wanted him to come out because he was worried about his cat and a neighborhood raccoon. The problem? Instead of sleeping in her cozy cat bed, the cat was snuggling down to sleep every day with a full-grown raccoon in an old doghouse in the backyard! Shouldn’t he get rid of the raccoon? Sean said he didn’t see a conflict—the inter-speci
es friendship seemed to be going just fine, and if this raccoon was removed, another would likely move in, and maybe one not as friendly to cats.
Urban-wildlife biologist Russell Link emphasizes the impracticality and potential cruelty of moving raccoons. Although trapping and relocating a raccoon several miles away might seem like a benign method to give a problem animal a second chance, the reality is unpromising. Raccoons typically try to return to their familiar territories, often getting hit by a car or killed by a predator in the process. If raccoons are moved to a place deemed perfect for raccoons, then there are probably already raccoons living there. If the relocated raccoons stay in the new area, they upset the social balance, often fighting (sometimes to the grisly death) with resident raccoons for food or shelter. Significantly, if a raccoon is accustomed to finding shelter and food around human habitations, the animal is likely to seek a similar situation, thus causing the same problems it did before. “People, organizations, or agencies who move raccoons,” writes Link, “should be willing to assume liability for any damages caused by these animals.” In most cases, relocating raccoons won’t solve the problem anyway, because other raccoons are likely waiting in the wings, ready to replace them. Link hopes, and I do too, that lethal control will be viewed as an ethically unpalatable and absolutely last resort.
The Urban Bestiary Page 7