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People have been trying to make the house raccoon a thing: https://old.reddit.com/r/raccoons https://old.reddit.com/r/raccoons From what I remember spending ti

• caymanjim 1y ago
  They're pretty great pets. We had one for a while when I was a kid. Its mom got run over and we nursed it and raised it for a few months. Instinctively used the same litter box as the cats. Hung out on the couch sitting on my shoulder watching TV. Friendly and playful. Would follow people around and play with toys. The biggest challenge is that they basically have hands. He would climb up the kitchen cabinets, grab a box of cereal, open it up and sit there eating out of it like a toddler. We only had him for a few months before reintroducing him to the woods behind the house. I've wanted a pet raccoon again ever since.
  • mrsvanwinkle 1y ago
    best HN story ive read in a while. i want a raccoon that eating tinyfist-fuls of cereal steaight from the box it opened, watching TV
    • 4ggr0 1y ago
      sounds very similar to a stoner-roommate to be honest. a bit chaotic, but peaceful. hungry, and bored.
  • bitwize 1y ago
    "What do you think we have these wonderfully articulate fingers for? To scratch our asses?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqTt_jDDCio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqTt_jDDCio
  • riffraff 1y ago
    There's a Japanese anime from the '70s called something like "rascal the racoon", based on an American book, which tells the story of a kid with a pet raccoon. I've wanted a pet raccoon since I saw this on TV in the '80s, and raccoons aren't even a thing in Europe :(
    • callmemclovin 1y ago
      Well at least in Germany they are a thing - a quick google search says there's a population of >1 million raccoons in Germany.
      • tomaytotomato 1y ago
        Indeed, Germany has a Raccoon problem https://youtu.be/eq3brUMm3gA https://youtu.be/eq3brUMm3gA
      • fnands 1y ago
        Can confirm. I was running through a forest in Berlin and saw a raccoon in a tree. Was a little confused, but apparently quite a few around here.
    • shawn_w 1y ago
      Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era. I had that book as a kid. There was a live action Disney film of it; didn't know about the anime version. Neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascal_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascal_(book)
      • IAmBroom 1y ago
        A generation of us grew up deeply coveting a pet coon, and have never given up on that dream, really... The shocker for me was the bit about Rascal learning not to wash his sugarcubes before eating (or actually, to rinse once, because he was OCD about washing his food). Not that itself, although fascinating and charming; the idea that sugar was rationed to the author's family was mindblowing to juvenile me.
  • EdwardDiego 1y ago
    My wife and I wish our country didn't have such restrictive biosecurity laws, because AWWW THEIR CUTE LITTLE HANDS.... (I mean, there's good reasons my country does have those laws, and I don't _really_ want to have a wild animal as a pet, but I kinda do.)
    • trhway 1y ago
      on the other side - if not for these laws, somebody would have produced a pet racoon breed in several generations, smth like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox#/media/File:Adisey_fox.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox#/media... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox)
      • Nevermark 1y ago
        I want to breed octopus to live longer. Then identify the "morph", the gene cluster, that did the trick in the initial species, to speed up the uplift for the rest of them. But given how intelligent they are, and how much they learn in their short lifetimes, completely self-directed and self-learning highly curious autodidact geniuses from the moment they escape their tiny egg, a race of long lived octopuses without learning brakes might be an existential threat for us. Or they might create a magical ocean civilization. There are octopus species everywhere. Deepest ocean floor, under the polar cap, even a "land" species that lives on the beach. Everywhere from sea level down.
        • nickserv 1y ago
          Death follows mating for the males and the eggs hatching for the females. Not an uncommon behavior, all sorts of plants (ie agave) and animals (ie salmon) have a similar strategy. Meaning the strategy works very well, and would likely be controlled by very different genes, depending on the species. Changing this "death gene" via a breeding program is likely to fail, but could perhaps be accomplished via gene editing like CRISPR. Another approach would be delaying sexual maturity. Doubling the lifespan to something like 4-5 years in the common octopus would have very interesting results. However, doubling the lifespan would effectively halve the number of offspring, meaning these mutants would be less competitive, compared to their wild relatives. This could be seen as the needed safeguard to prevent a race of highly intelligent mollusks from taking our planetary domination crown. So all in all, delaying sexual maturity seems to be the better way to go for your project. Do keep us updated on the advancement.
  • Ccecil 1y ago
    A former girlfriend of mine had a picture of her mother holding a Raccoon. I asked her mother about it and she said that they lived out in the woods in Minnesota and they found it on the porch when it was a baby. The mother had died or something so they kinda raised it. It was free roaming in/out of the house but they could hold it and it would also get into their food. She mentioned one time it ate a bunch of mixed nuts...but didn't like one type so it left all those in the bowl. Another time it ate an entire pie...but left her one piece ("so she wouldn't get angry"). She did say it was never really a "pet"...more like a wild animal that sometimes acted like one. This would have been in the late 70s early 80s by my guess on her age in the pictures.
    • BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 1y ago
      They have a lot in common with housecats, except that they are more clever. Decades ago we heard a crunch crunch sound from the rear mudroom. We looked and saw a raccoon reaching in and eating dry cat out of a box with the cat looking on enviously. Camping I heard a crunching sound, looked out from the tent to see a racoon helping itself to granola in the back of the car. Lock your doors.
  • gwd 1y ago
    I remember reading somewhere once that baby raccoons are actually quite cuddly and tame; but that when they go adolescence, they have a hormone shift that makes them aggressive enough to be unsuitable as a pet. In the story a woman who had raised a baby raccoon was attacked by it after it grew to a certain age.
    • zukzuk 1y ago
      Judging by the murderous sounds you hear all night here in the summer, I would not want to be cornered in a dark alley by a gang of adolescent raccoons.
      • amypetrik8 1y ago
        >Judging by the murderous sounds you hear all night here in the summer, I would not want to be cornered in a dark alley by a gang of adolescent raccoons. Well if you ask me adolescent raccoons are a big problem in many of our cities, I'd be worried about such a case myself.
    • mr_toad 1y ago
      One of the hallmarks of domestication is retaining pre-adolescent behaviour in adulthood, for example dogs barking.
    • ekropotin 1y ago
      Well, that sounds a lot like humans offsprings
    • dwd 1y ago
      Wombats are the same. Cute and cuddly when little and one day just snap.
    • tdeck 1y ago
      I've heard the same thing from my mother, whose uncle had a baby raccoon as a pet. Once he got older he became mean and would yank on her hair for no reason.
    • Nevermark 1y ago
  • barbazoo 1y ago
    What about the smell? I’ve experienced ferrets is why I’m asking.
    • caymanjim 1y ago
      I can't remember. We had ferrets too, and they smelled. I don't recall the raccoon having a strong smell. Maybe they smell when they're older.
• tzs 1y ago
  Assuming you are starting with a wild raccoon, get one from a population that is not in the eastern parts of the US or Canada and rabies is unlikely. Here in Washington state for example there have been no documented cases of rabies in any wild raccoon in at least 60 years. Same goes for all other wild terrestrial mammals here.
  • I_am_uncreative 1y ago
    Plus, there are vaccines to prevent it.
    • jb1991 1y ago
      If you were talking about the rabies vaccine, for humans, that’s not really a normal vaccine for people to get. It’s not like getting the flu vaccine or the chickenpox vaccine or others, and they shouldn’t be lumped into that same category.
      • LandR 1y ago
        How is it not? I'm currently 1 of 3 injections into getting a rabies vaccine and it's basically like every other vaccine I've had. A simple, painless, injection in the arm. I got it the same time as my first shot of the Hep B vaccine too.
        • devin 1y ago
          This style of rabies vaccine is for pre-exposure. Post-exposure vaccination is more involved if you aren’t primed. In addition, it used to be the case that people received abdominal shots and the course was pretty intense. That has ended, but people remember it.
          • throwaway290 1y ago
            post exposure vaccination is a thing?? does it work for everything and why is it called vaccination not treatment?
• MagicMoonlight 1y ago
  People can also get rabies, that doesn’t mean we ban babies or perform mass cullings. If they were domesticated, you’d just get them vaccinated at the vet.
• _the_inflator 1y ago
  Jep, just have a look here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45964090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45964090 It astounds me, that government still doesn't want to kill say 20k of these invaders.
  • whynotmaybe 1y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45965985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45965985
• sqircles 1y ago
  Just make sure you know your state's laws and regulations very well. I had a friend in a mid-western state that was caring for a couple of babies when a tree fell and killed their mother. They were in contact with a licensed rescue to get them to them. The Dept. of Conservation caught wind and showed up at their house, took the animals, walked into their back yard with them and shot them on the spot.
• officeplant 1y ago
  Family raised multiple raccoons over the years until wildlife rescue became more of a common thing you could call up. The garage was seemingly a hot spot for the occasional runt raccoon with closed eyes to be left behind. They not only get bored they get very particular with who in the family they enjoy following. Which can cause even more havoc when someone gets upset the raccoon doesn't want to be around them. One particularly funny story was a customer's kid (Business was attached to the house) begged and cried to be let hold the raccoon. We all knew it was a bad idea but Grandpa caved to the customer's demands so the kid would shut up. The racoon gladly let me hand her over to the kid, crawled up on the kids shoulder and proceeded to shit from one shoulder to the other then immediately jump off and return to my shoulder to glare at the kid. Never again did we let anyone outside the family touch the raccoon until we gave her up to a local zoo for use in educational programs since she was fairly well trained to behave for treats.
• saghm 1y ago
  Sometimes I I think people really underestimate the circumstances needed for domestication of a species to be successful. There's this conception of our human abilities as something that supersedes the way nature works and shape things the way we want, which might at least appear to be true in a lot of cases, but I don't think that domestication can work just because we happen to want it to. The most coherent take I've read on it is that there actually needs to be an evolutionary advantage for the species in order for the domestication to work out, which means it's essentially something that needs to take place over generations. Raccoons being cute and fluffy might be a reason that we would like to have them around, but I think the larger question is whether there's a good enough reason for them to develop a lifestyle where they hang around indoors with humans. Putting it in terms of evolution also can help clarify why the personality characteristics you mention aren't a simple obstacle to overcome; the fact that they might be better off as a species in the long run if they could just immediately switch over to being a type of house pet like a cat or dog might not be enough if the path to that from where they are now requires significant "downward movement" from a local optimum in the short term for the adaptions start becoming more advantageous so that the can reach a higher optimum.