Originally published at: Woman takes baby raccoon to Petco for a nail trim — with unfortunate results | Boing Boing
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This person was clearly an idiot, but I wonder whether the rise in popularity of the Guardians of the Galaxy has made more people view Raccoons as rascally teddy bears, worthy of being kept as pets, instead of the wild animals that they are.
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That would not surprise me. There’s been a long-standing niche of people trying to keep raccoons as pets, but it seems to be on the rise. Keeping other wild animals as pets has been on the rise (seemingly) as well, perhaps due to social media channels devoted to them.
People continue to believe that anything cute must be nice, and if we’re nice to wild animals, they’ll be nice back. Anthropomorphization run amok, with a soupçon of Disney-based nature education.
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If that’s true, the world would be far better off if people were to instead take a different message and adopt feral Hemsworths.
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There’s only one good one and he’s taken.
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From UPI: …Raccoons are one of the most common carriers of rabies, a disease that can be lethal unless quickly treated.
no, UPI (or whoever wrote this), it is fckng lethal unless very quickly treated. jfc.
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That should be more of a cautionary tale, but maybe that’s just me?
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All for the best probably. Once you start feeding one, the others will just show up to beg.
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Wait, we’re still maintaining that animals have to be euthanized to test for rabies, while humans have several different non-lethal testing methods? I see that officially you have to examine the brain (and obviously we can’t do brain matter biopsies on animals . . .) “when a human life is on the line,” and the 50-year-old method is considered the gold standard by the CDC and other such bodies, but surely modern medicine can do better than that. I guess it’s just not a priority, if what I’m reading over at the NIH site is still accurate (a 2013 survey of testing methods) the best human testing is still only about 33% accurate if done before the virus become untreatable.
Sounds like there is more work to be done, and someone will make a lot of pet owners and farmers happy (and probably wads of cash) if they can invent a no-kill test. Or has something changed in the last decade, and some people just want to have animals killed whenever possible?
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I’ve heard that the thing with raccoons is that when they are young they attach strongly to their mother. So a young raccoons are super cute and friendly with people who take on that surrogate role… but in nature when they reach adulthood, kinda like human teenagers, they get feisty and mean and leave that relationship. So when humans have them it becomes really problematic at that age. They bite, they tear up your house, etc. they aren’t good pets at all once they are adults. (Not that it’s good to have them when young, but just explaining how people fall into the trap)
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maybe that, and the popularity of youtube videos showing people hand-feeding swarms of them…
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I wonder if Youtube / TikTok are a factor as well. There are tons of cute videos of raccoons as pets and when you click on one you start seeing more and more. Of course they are only showing the cutest and most fun 120 seconds of the pet raccoon experience.
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The internet is full of people who raise animals like this as a hobby, and from what I can tell it’s really normalized the idea of trying to make pets out of animals like raccoons, opossums, skunks, and a host of other animals that aren’t pets or livestock already. Laws are often nebulous and contested too, and so it’s hard to enforce any kind of opposition to it.
Hypothesis: Domestication of animals is kind of natural to humans and so, unsurprisingly, humans enjoy seeing it in all stages… but the consequences are harder to get through to folks than the dopamine rush that getting an animals brings. So this proliferates and we share the consequences as people test the limits of whatever laws exist in their area.
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As my old great-grandpappy used to say, “Never befrien’ a raccoon ’less it kin fix yer truck and handle an automatic.”
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While we’re talking about humans being irresponsible with raccoons:
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that’s a pretty good theory. i wonder if another group of people started planting trees because of the same movie
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It wasn’t a theory. It was a hypothesis. 
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Remember the run (and later abandonment) of Dalmatians when the live-action 101 Dalmatians premiered?
Of course, I think we have social media like TikTok to blame more these days. Anything for the likes. 
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I love raccoons and they’re adorable but they also don’t let you forget they’re wild animals. They’ve given me some pretty frightening death stares when they realize I’m watching, and I can’t imagine one allowing me to touch it unless it was to violently and suspiciously snatch food from me (this is hypothetical, I don’t feed raccoons). Maybe the babies are more friendly but I feel like anyone treating a raccoon as a pet probably has very little experience with actual pets and must be astoundingly ignorant about reading animals’ body language.
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