If raccoons are wild animals, why are they so darn cute? If that’s a question you’ve ever asked yourself while looking at a picture of the furry urban dwellers with their beady eyes and tiny paws, you’re not alone.
The internet is in love with raccoons. There are videos of people on TikTok keeping raccoons as pets, feeding them candy and pup cups from Starbucks. Kids have been known to bring the black and white trash bandits into the house.
Well, there may be a scientific reason for the allure of the raccoon. A new study shows that urban raccoons could be showing early signs of domestication.
Raffaela Lesch, a researcher at the University of Arkansas, joined us to share more.
4 questions with Raffaela Lesch
What are some of the signs that a wild animal like a raccoon might be getting closer to domestication?
“The thing is, all our domesticated animals share certain traits. Like, for example, we see commonly that domesticated animals have smaller brains, shorter snouts, curly tails, floppy ears, white patches. So I really wanted to see if the city environment would be able to mimic the environment that maybe our cat and dog ancestors found themselves in. And that’s really what inspired this entire study.”
What did you find with raccoons?
“We downloaded raccoon images from [iNaturalist] and then looked at whether those raccoons were from rural or urban environments, and then proceeded to measure the snouts on those animals and compared basically how the snout length differed in urban [and] rural environments.
“We were excited to find that urban raccoons have shorter snouts than rural raccoons, which potentially could be a sign of the domestication phenotype.”
Do you have any theories about why this might be happening with raccoons?
“The human environment in general is an environment that does provide certain benefits to animals. So, for example, where us humans go, we produce a lot of trash that almost is kind of like a buffet for some animals. So living in close proximity to humans comes with kind of easier, accessible food. But it also means that you have to be able to deal with that proximity to humans, so you have to be bold enough to exist in that space. But of course, you also have to be non-aggressive, because if you’re aggressive towards humans, that usually is the end of that specific individual’s lifespan.”
Evolution is something that happens really slowly. But as I mentioned, people are already keeping raccoons as pets and living with them just like they do with dogs and cats. I’m curious, what you think about that and whether it’s good for the animal or for the people?
“I would not recommend owning a raccoon at the moment, since even if they’re in the early stages of domestication, they’re still wild animals. Because, as you mentioned, these domestication processes take thousands of years. So we really are still dealing with a wild animal that has started to adjust to human environment. But they’re far away from pets, so they’re not like dogs or cats.
“If you adopted a raccoon today, that still would be very much a wild animal that you put in your living room. And we all know how much damage the average dog and cat can do to our interior design.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Kalyani Saxena produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Micaela Rodríguez. Saxena also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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