About 30 years ago, I was sitting in a hole-in-the-wall bar when a man and woman walked in. On the man's shoulders was a baby raccoon. It was fastidiously grooming itself, paying no mind to the dozen people who were crowding around the couple, firing off questions about the animal.
In truth, it was the cutest thing I've ever seen. Not quite cat-like in its disdain for humans, and it did not possess a dog-like need to please. But it was friendly and appeared to like humans. Its fur was amazingly soft, and it loved having its belly scratched.
I asked the man if it was "tame."
"As soon as we can stop him from tearing up the furniture and nipping and scratching us if he gets angry, he'll be tame enough," he replied.
The raccoon was orphaned as a baby in rural Illinois after its mother had misjudged a road crossing. The couple found the baby squeaking beside its mother's corpse and decided to take it home.
Raccoons are cute and cuddly until they get older. Then they're apparently more than most people can handle. But what about raccoons who live in close proximity to humans?
"Urban raccoons have become more curious and less reactive, writes The Atlantic's Annie Lowrey. "They have also started to develop distinctive traits common among tame species and uncommon among wild ones."
Humans have been deliberately domesticating wild animals for around 10,000–12,000 years. Canines in particular have been domesticated for tens of thousands of years, but it was only recently, perhaps 15,000 years ago, that dog DNA split off from wolf DNA into a separate, distinct species.
Agriculture drove the wave of domestication. After dogs, most domesticated animals appeared during the transition to farming:
- Sheep: 11,000–15,000 years ago in Southeast Europe and Southwest/Central Asia
- Cattle: 10,000–15,000 years ago in Eurasia/Southwest Asia
- Goats: 8,000–9,000 years ago in Western Asia
- Pigs: 5,000–9,000 years ago in the Middle East and later across Eurasia
- Horses: ~5,000 years ago in Eastern Europe/Western Asia (modern Mongolia/Siberia)
Cats pretty much domesticated themselves 5,000–7,000 years ago. Once they figured out how to manipulate humans to feed them, it was all over for people. They were well and truly captured.
But raccoons? Some academics believe that raccoons are actively domesticating, "much like the curious wolves that eventually transformed into pugs," writes Lowrey.
Frontiers in Zoology published a study last year on the phenomenon of raccoons becoming domesticated. "Tracking domestication signals across populations of North American raccoons (Procyon lotor) via citizen science-driven image repositories" discusses the "comparative work on the effects of human environments on phenotypic traits (observable and measurable characteristics of an animal).
The researchers found that the snout length of raccoons had shortened and some of their behavioral characteristics altered as a result of their close contact with humans.
The study received mainstream media attention. Social media posts heralded the arrival of the “new American pet.” The research confirmed what many Americans believed about raccoons, or what they wanted to believe.
"Raccoons aren’t just raccoons, after all," writes Lowrey. "They’re up there with capybaras and deep-sea anglerfish as objects of unhinged human adoration. They’re trash pandas."
Raccoons have captured the human heart for 700 years.
The raccoon’s thriving represents not merely a remarkable triumph but a remarkable turnaround. When Christopher Columbus arrived on Long Island (the one in the Bahamas, not New York) in 1492, he noticed a local fisherman keeping some strange kind of dogs as pets. He was far from the last colonist to be confused by the species, described nearly 300 years later by the explorer Jonathan Carver as possessing a badger’s body, fox’s head, dog’s muzzle, cat’s tail, and sharp claws that let it climb like a monkey. (Raccoons are not a close relative of any of those animals; they are procyonids, related to coatis and kinkajous.) Following Columbus’s second voyage, Europeans ate so many of the animals that they went extinct on the island of Hispaniola.
"Coonskin hats" were all the rage in Europe and America in the early 1800s. Most readers were too young to get in on the Davey Crockett mania of the 1950s, the first truly TV-inspired social phenomenon in history. The Walt Disney three-part movie took America by storm, and every kid in America wanted a raccoon hat for Christmas.
Raccoons were probably never in danger of going extinct, since they range across the entire North American continent, including Canada and Mexico. But thanks to humans, their population was severely depleted. And also thanks to humans, their population rebounded. "Developers and farmers destroyed their natural habitats, woodlands and marshlands, but built unnatural environments that suited raccoons just as well," writes Lowrey.
The beasts are extremely intelligent, smarter than dogs in some respects.
Humans don’t deserve all the credit for raccoons’ success, I should note. The animals are one of nature’s star utility players. They are opportunistic feeders, eating just about anything available. They are opportunistic den-makers, exploiting whatever natural cavities or fabricated structures they find. They are intelligent, having long memories and a knack for problem-solving. “If you give them a puzzle and change the rules, they go with it,” Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at UC Berkeley, told me. “They have this creativity.” On top of that, they are dexterous enough to shuck oysters, unscrew jars, unlatch gates, and pick knots.
Much like pigeons, ants, rats, and crows, raccoons have adapted to urban life in ways that have affected their development. Suzanne MacDonald, an animal psychologist at York University, told Lowrey: “They’re much more social in the city.”
“We’ve ended up with animals that don’t run away from us, and instead come sit on our patio furniture,” as MacDonald put it.
Foxes “are never to be made familiar,” the naturalist John Lawson wrote in 1709. “The Raccoon is.” Not exactly. Mr. Lawson couldn't have imagined the Soviet Union's experiment in taming foxes.
The Belyayev experiment showed that selecting only the calmest, least fearful foxes each generation produced animals that would actively seek human contact, wag their tails, whine for attention, and behave like dogs, and show dramatically reduced stress responses.
But the foxes are domesticated only within the experimental population in Novosibirsk, and they are not a stable, widespread domestic species. Perhaps after a few more decades, as the population of these altered foxes grows, a different conclusion might be reached.
Raccoons might be domesticating themselves, something like cats did 5,000 years ago. If so, we might measure full domestication in decades. The one certainty is that the human-raccoon relationship is changing.
What it ends up being is anyone's guess.
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