I love raccoons (Procyon lotor): they’re wily, cute, and fiercely smart. I used to have one who regularly came through the cat door of my old crib and ate the cat food—but not before washing it in the cat’s water bowl. I first realized something was amiss when I kept finding dirt in the water bowl. That was after an entire pound of Christmas chocolates mysteriously disappeared, with the box and wrappers strewn all over the dining room. And then one night the coon—a huge male—wandered into my bedroom.
Raccoons love to wash their food, and I suppose it’s a hygienic measure. At any rate, this one seems to be a compulsive paw-washer.
And one of my favorite LOLcoons:
My cat used to do that too.
it’s supposed that cleaning their food in water is actually a vacuum activity and not a hygienic action
A vacuum activity? Shouldn’t they be wearing spacesuits then?
I thought they wet their food because they do not have salivary glands?
I wouldn’t want them wandering around in my house, rabies is an issue locally. Rabid skunks, too.
Well thanks buzz killington.
I had a friendly close encounter with a raccoon once while canoeing. I shared a pack of mini smoked sausages with him. After about ten minutes of getting comfortable with me he would take them out of my hand one by one. Yet the entire time he never looked at the food. His eyes stayed locked on to my face. When I would hold out the next sausage he would feel around my hand with his forepaws until he found the sausage by feel. Felt just like tiny little hands wearing fine leather gloves.
There is a raccoon that comes and eats cat food from the porch – no dabbling in the water that I have seen, but when I walked out on him one night and found him eating from the cat food bowl (with the cat watching fascinated), he did just as you describe: carried on reaching out and grabbing handfuls and stuffing them in his mouth while staring unblinkingly into my eyes. The effect was so comic that I laughed and he looked outraged and shuffled off.
Actually, it’s thought that the “washing” behavior is related to tactile stimulation. Their forepaws have hairless areas on them, which have nerve groupings that are similar to primates. In other words, their forepaws are rather sensitive to touch. The slowly adapting nerves in those areas relay information about size, temperature, texture, etc to the CNS. In the study linked below, it was concluded that wetting the forepaw skin increases nerve responsiveness, and therefore, heightens tactile sensation. Raccoons don’t have sharp vision, so this is certainly an advantageous trait to have!
Just an FYI, the “lack of saliva” statement (which has certainly become main stream) is a myth. They have salivary glands. Those glands play a key role in transmission of rabies!
I’ve had quite a bit of experience with them via rehabilitation/release. They are fiercely intelligent, marvelously curious WILD animals. I have a healthy appreciation for the strength they possess and the zoonoses that they are associated with. I’m still a fan 🙂
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3797915?ordinalpos
What I remember about these: while on a hike I saw one climbing a tree. As it went up it put the trunk of the tree between me and it..and as I attempted to circle the tree it circled as well; it wanted me to be antipodal (with respect to the tree trunk).
It did that at the cost of going up the tree more slowly.
When raccoon are frightened they fluff up their fur and do a mock sideways charge to make themselves look even bigger and fiercer. This will more than likly scare the g’jeepies out of any would be adversary. How was it?
It didn’t do that; it just went into the tree and looked at me. It was more of “being careful” but not really being scared.
When I was a lad of 8 or 9 my father rescued a pair of tiny raccoon pups he found crying piteously at the site of a barn fire. My sister and I nursed them with a baby bottle (on who knows what, none of us knew a damn thing about raccoons, really) until they were able to take solid food, whereupon they graduated to puppy chow and table scraps.
We rather unimaginatively named them ‘Racket’ and ‘Bandit’ and for a few moths that spring/summer they were more or less pets. I would perch them on my shoulders and one would even cling there while I rode my bicycle. My parents operated a restaurant at the time and I remember vividly one of them taking the plunge into a vat of cold, filthy fryer grease out back, extricating himself, and leaving a filthy, oily trail all over the property. I do not remember if he enjoyed the subsequent shampooing but I assume he didn’t.
Eventually of course they got too big and too wild to keep and we rather reluctantly let my father confine them to a hastily-constructed ‘pen’ – from which they immediately escaped never to be seen again. No doubt that was exactly as Dad planned, but it was easier on us kids than turning them loose into the woods ourselves, though that might have been the better lesson.
Last summer, I woke up one morning to discover a raccoon-sized hole in a livingroom window screen. He devoured all of the cat food and made quite a dent in a huge bag of Purina. No mess in the house, thankfully. And, yes, as fascinating as they are, the risk of rabies is very high. I’m glad this critter didn’t decide to take a nap with me!
Rats also love to wash their paws and groom when they’re around water. Raccoons are much prettier animals though.
While camping a few years ago I was disturbed in the morning by some clanking. I looked out and there were three young racoons on the picnic table exploring the cup and plastic water jug left there. They bit the bottom of the water jug and let all the water out. When I stepped out to say good morning, one ran away through the leaves, another climbed a tree and third flattened itself on the table. I just laughed and walked away.
The ‘Nature of Things’ program had a episode recently on raccoons, and as a previous comment mentioned, the ‘washing food’ is a common misconception. I recall that the program said that it was to soften callouses on their hands so that the nerves in them became more sensitive. In essence it made their fingers more sensitive to both touch and apparently taste.
That cute racoon in the video is like the Lady MacBeth of racoons “out, out damn spot!”
Sadly, their adaptability around humans causes problems. Raccoon numbers are through the roof in many places, much higher than ever occurred historically, presumably a combination of lack of predators and access to garbage. Herpetologists consider raccoon overpopulation to be one of the most significant factors in the decline of several turtle species in the US. Turtle nest predation is 100% every year in many places, and raccoons are one of the few predators that eat adult turtles, including species that normally have an annual survival rate near 100% and live 75+ years.
As as a child my brother and I raised two raccoons whose mother had been killed by an auto. They went from chubby bottle fed babies to huge rather well behaved adults with teeth. They loved hanging around people. Keeping them caged was nearly impossible and not all our neighbors appreciated their going from house to house begging for food.
The other day, around 4:30 a.m,as i was walking to my local safeway in a part of seattle that is quite bucolic i heard a bird screeching the way i had never heard a bird screech before… a screech owl i assume.. lots of big owls about… big conniffer, red cedar…. after a while down climbs the egg snatcher… but there am i who give mr. coon a friendly woof. mr. coon angles his way to a tree a few trees over and descends. they are tree huggers, at a small wooden bridge, across a canal or the estuary of ravenna creek into lake washington. one day i saw a mother coon try to paw one of her young to safety who had been wounded while crossing 25th avenue over into the green. they are the most delicate of balancers too.
Back when I lived in the suburbs of central NJ, I saw raccoons very often – gigantic ones, too, who were extremely well fed on human refuse.
For the 11 or so years I’ve been living here in rural northwest NJ, I can only recall seeing a single raccoon, and it was fairly small. No shortage of deer, skunks, bears, foxes, etc. But no raccoons. I find it very curious.
A big raccoon used to knock over my garbage can before the city gave us larger wheeled bins, more difficult to push over I would guess. When I turned on the porch light & came out to see what was happening, he established eye contact as others have mentioned, but he did not look very friendly. I interpreted his message as
“What are you lookin at?”
There seems to be one or two human rabies deaths per year in the US. That places it very low on the list of ‘things to worry about’.
Yes, but there are many more encounters that result in having to go through the whole unpleasant series of shots to prevent rabies. In addition, pets and livestock that encounter rabid animals are quite in danger.
Take a gander through most of the posts on this blog to appreciate how widespread a problem rabies is in the States:
http://naturalunseenhazards.wordpress.com/
A girlfriend and I once had two raccoons, and often observed, with amusement, their staring vacantly off into space while piddling their food in our cats’ water bowl.
Until one day, as we were walking them preparatory to seeing if they were sufficiently self-reliant to be released, we took them down to the pond. They instantly charged the margin of the pond, and, staring vacantly into space, began piddling in the mud at the edge of the pond, feeling for nommmies. And we instantly understood what the “washing” behavior was for.