In 50 years, this researcher has managed to breed more-or-less domesticated foxes, just by selecting the ones least skittish in the presence of humans. There are some interesting physical changes that go along with domestication.
“The foxes started to look different over time: their ears got floppier, their legs, tails and snouts got shorter and their skulls got wider. Even their breeding patterns changed, they now mated out of season and had on average one more offspring per litter.”
If it can be done with foxes, I imagine it’s possible with raccoons. A truly tame raccoon would be a useful companion animal, what with the hands and all.
Yes, I can’t speak for all of my kind, but there are some subcultures that simply define ‘pet’ and ‘domestication’ more loosely than cityfolk.
Also, there tends to be rules of thumb about what makes an ‘indoor pet’ versus an ‘outdoor pet’.
I’ve been in a lot of abandoned houses. For God knows what reason, they love to poop in the kitchen sink until it is completely full and level to the rim. It makes me wonder if we should copy kitchen sinks to re-design irresistible litter boxes.
Perhaps in the forest, but I see lots of nominally-wild trash pandas waddle past my house in Toronto. There’s nothing like leftover pizza and KFC for packing on the pounds.
Then you get curious cases like the totally adorable Soviet fox taming experiment; which got pretty solid results out of a species that, while not totally impossible to handle in wild type, is not generally seen as a domestic animal. There appear to be at least some under-tapped options.
On the other hand you have cases like Zebras, which have largely failed to pan out despite a number of attempts.
Yes, on the poop.
Our city trash pandas ( we live in San Francisco now) and BTW twice as big as their country cousins, loved to poop in exactly the same place is the deck of our hot tub!
Once the tub was removed they picked a other place on our deck. Tried everything from ground peppers to motion controlled squirt gun of my own design to no avail.
Very Smart critters, indeed.
Well…you could try putting an old kitchen sink in that spot, then gradually move it farther and farther away from the house, like the way you paper-train puppies.
Well, anything that we’ve put in the time to domesticate. Wolves make even worse pets than raccoons, but we turned them into dogs eventually. I’m sure we could make perfectly obedient, housebroken raccoons given a few centuries of careful breeding, maybe less. You’re not going to do it with a single animal, though.
UGH. I would be trapping, tagging, and relocating these trash pandas ASAP. Although where you live, it might not be legal to relocate wildlife, even nuisances.
Parasitic worms are nasty no matter what; but a variety with, apparently, a special fondness for the tissues of the eyes and central nervous system is to be avoided where possible. For extra credit, the eggs are quite durable and resistant to common cleaning methods.
Actually, I put a steel cat weathervane with the clear marble eyes out there and it freaked them out.
with glowing eyes and movement provided by the wind. ( photo not mine )
Scary!!
I heard this and had a little long-handled shovel to scoop with.
Poop tip: Sprinkle Backing soda on top of fresh poop and wait a day for drying.
Also, carry toothpick flags in your wallet to put in Dog poop that owners have not picked up.
You could look at this as a parable about why you shouldn’t keep “wild” animals as pets, or you could look at it as an investigation of what the difference between “wild” and “domesticated” actually is. For most people, option 1 is probably more relevant - most of us live very human-specific lives that wild animals will never fit into - but option 2 is more interesting.
Dealing with animals is no different to dealing with humans - it’s all about what do they want, who is stronger, who’s more desperate, etc. - except that with humans we have all these cultural conventions to help the process along. A lot of the worse parts of human existence involve those conventions being manipulated, so if you can get good at living alongside wild animals it probably makes living with humans a lot easier, or at least makes you better at understanding what’s going on.
