Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication

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"

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...

President Calvin Coolidge had a pet raccoon in the White House: https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2021/01/when-rebecca-the-raccoon-r...

If dogs started out as wolves and ended up as English bulldogs, imagine how stupid raccoons will eventually look.

> 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?

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?

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

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’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.

I want to see an intelligence-optimized domesticated raccoon breed, like the raccoon equivalent of a border collie

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.

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

I think I know one or two family members who have been aiding and abetting this evolutionary process

Just name coyotes to the AKC, would you?

Would be cool if it eventually leads to a Cambrian explosion of raccoon varieties after generations of breeding desirable traits.

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.