Raccoon invades beer warehouse with predictable result

June 19, 2015 • 3:30 pm

It’s Friday afternoon, and that means GOOFY ANIMAL VIDEOS. From United Press International, we have a drunken procyonid:

NEW YORK, June 18 (UPI) — A New York man shared video online of a raccoon [Procyon lotor] trying its best to walk in a straight line without falling over after getting into some alcoholic beverages.

The video, posted to YouTube by Phillipp Scott, shows the animal stumbling around a warehouse near some broken alcoholic beverage containers while a man’s voice notes, “This raccoon is drunk!”

The raccoon stumbles over to some broken beer bottles and appears to lick some of the spilled beverage up from the floor.

The tipsy thief eventually seems to notice he’s being watched and stumbles away from the human voices. It nearly escapes the range of the camera’s vision before falling onto its side.

Scott said on Twitter the video was filmed at Union Beer Distributors in Brooklyn.

If you think it’s rabid, I’ll suggest you’re wrong: this animal is three sheets to the wind.

Other drunken raccoons:

On wine.

On fermented berries.

And, since it’s Friday, here are ten good raccoon videos in one clip. What is it doing with the dog’s mouth in bit #2? Watch it wet its paws before eating in clip #3. And be sure to watch them abscond with pizza.  As for the hydrophilia of this species, I think it remains unexplained.

28 thoughts on “Raccoon invades beer warehouse with predictable result”

  1. Is it allowed to keep raccoons as pets? I would be concerned about rabies though.

    1. Probably allowed, though it might depend on local ordinances. I would expect there to be the same requirement for rabies vaccinations as with dogs and cats.

    2. Marlon Brando famously had a raccoon as a pet when he was a young man. I’m not sure about the legality, but when I had a pet skunk, which was legal, I had it vaccinated against all the usual stuff.

  2. Rather surprised to see that raccoon leaping into that guy’s arms over and over. Are raccoons quasi-domesticated? Maybe some are friendlier than others. But there’s no way I would let one get that close to ME.

    1. They are friendly like that when young but all of a sudden, they turn completely wild and will grown and snap at the same person who played with them. That’s how you know it is time to release one you’ve looked after.

      1. It seems likely to me that one could breed a domesticated variety in a similar way to the Russian experiment with foxes. Take the ones with the least fear response to humans as adults and inbreed for that lack of adrenaline. It would probably take a few decades, as with the Russian experiment. But one might come up with a very intelligent pet/companion sub-species.

        2. It would probably take a few decades, as with the Russian experiment.

          IIRC, the Russian experiment produced significant results in generating tamed foxes in only a few generations. The struggle since has been to keep the blood lines going with extremely limited funding.

  3. I once had the opportunity to watch a wasted black bear who had been eating fermented service berries in southern Montana. When he realized I was near he stood up on his hind legs and kept falling over backwards into a creek. He made a “woofing” sound, crawled out of the creek, and tried to walk off, much like the raccoon in the video. A funny sight, but I’m glad that I wasn’t around when he woke up with a hangover…!

  4. I like the raccoon eating the grapes best. He looks so stately sitting at the table even though he is a rather noisy eater.

  6. Dousing: The increased touch sensitivity hypothesis mentioned below is interesting – seems strange, but…

    QUOTES:
    In the wild, raccoons often dabble for underwater food near the shore-line. They then often pick up the food item with their front paws to examine it and rub the item, sometimes to remove unwanted parts. This gives the appearance of the raccoon “washing” the food. The tactile sensitivity of raccoons’ paws is increased if this rubbing action is performed underwater, since the water softens the hard layer covering the paws.

    However, the behavior observed in captive raccoons in which they carry their food to water to “wash” or douse it before eating has not been observed in the wild. Naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, believed that raccoons do not have adequate saliva production to moisten food thereby necessitating dousing, but this hypothesis is now considered to be incorrect.

    Captive raccoons douse their food more frequently when a watering hole with a layout similar to a stream is not farther away than 3 m (10 ft). The widely accepted theory is that dousing in captive raccoons is a fixed action pattern from the dabbling behavior performed when foraging at shores for aquatic foods. This is supported by the observation that aquatic foods are doused more frequently. Cleaning dirty food does not seem to be a reason for “washing”. Experts have cast doubt on the veracity of observations of wild raccoons dousing food.

    From Wiki

  8. I’m surprised that the kittehs are so calm around the coons. Loved the “Maru” one getting stuck in the plastic box.

  9. I had a young raccoon for part of my junior yr that I kept mostly in a cage, but a few times took with me on my shoulder, on treks across campus (with a collar). PCC may remember it. The clip with the guy playing with his, jumping from the sofa reminded me of that. After he’d eaten in the evening, I’d let him out of the cage. He’d come crawling along the fin-tube radiator cover and snap at my ear while I was lying on the bed reading. That meant it was play time, and we’d carry on.

    All probably dangerous in retrospect, but hey – we were bio majors. We didn’t have the Internet, either.

    1. Indeed. I think it was 60Minutes that did a piece on raccoons in Japan, where they were imported as cute pets. Predictably, some escaped and naturalized, where they play hell particularly on some of the religious shrines.

  13. I shot what I was sure was a rabid raccoon several years ago on my farm. It did not act like that coon which showed that it recognized the people. The coon I was sure was rabid seemed to be unaware of its surroundings and was walking in a circle it could not break. The foaming at the mouth pretty much said rabies to me also. It also looked like it had the mange. I figured that killing it and burying it so no other animal would use it for food was the best I could do for the other wildlife on the farm.

  14. Moving up a notch from drunken canines (are raccoons canids? Not sure ; not my continent.), we can always go to the reliable drunken elephant videos.
    Top that if you can. You’d probably need a very large amount of beer and a blue whale.
    I just thought of the well known factoid (thank you, QI) that a blue whale can’t swallow anything larger than a grapefruit. And the more I think about it, the less credible it gets. Even if you allow a complex oesophagus/ pharynx for separating tonnes of water from hundreds of kilos of krill … Nope, I can’t see it.
    Indeed, the QI trope seems to dominate the Internet, though the Wikipedia article cites a BBC programme with a more reasonable “beach ball” size (is that a milli-Library of Congress, or two atto-parsecs?). Anyone got an good whale anatomy sites in their bookmark lists?

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