Are Raccoons Evolving Into Pets? - The Atlantic

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At 10 p.m. in early July, Long Island was sweltering under a heat dome. As bedroom lights dimmed and heavy clouds rolled in, a raccoon ambled onto the porch of a split-level home, found a crack in a sliding door, and slipped inside. He tongue-polished a lasagna tray on the floor near the kitchen counter before waddling back into the damp fug of the summer night.<br>Soon after, a raccoon with a facial scar and a thin tail entered, ate a snack, and flopped down for a nap. Next, a pair of juvenile raccoons scrounged for kibble and used the dining chairs as a wrestling ring, hanging upside down from the rungs and tackling one another like luchadores. By dawn, a procession of animals had cycled through—one piebald kitty, a bunch of raccoons—like the stoned overnight patrons of a roadside Waffle House.<br>Marilyn Smith knows that things have escalated. Maybe, she concedes, they have even gotten out of hand. (I am giving her a pseudonym, because she worries her neighbors will call the police.) Years ago, she encountered a colony of feral cats on a nearby trail. She got involved in trapping and neutering the animals, and started feeding them. “I don’t know whether the word was out, but a gazillion cats came to my house,” Smith told me. She set up hard-shell crates for them in her backyard. She left her garage and porch doors open a bit so they could shelter during storms. In time, the feral cats became her cats, some with names, Tootsie and Little Baby and Foxy. “They trust me,” she said, describing how one curls up around her neck and sleeps on her pillow. Still, they often prefer to be outdoors.<br>Smith would not keep out the cats. Thus, she could not keep out the raccoons, who quickly lost whatever fear of her they might have had. They started appearing in her bedroom in the middle of the night, searching her pocketbook for kibble. They began breaking into her cabinets. They began dominating the tin cans she left out, making the cats caterwaul. Smith considered quelling the resource conflicts by feeding the species separately: cat food inside during the day, raccoon food outside at night. (Cats are crepuscular carnivores; raccoons are nocturnal omnivores.) It wouldn’t work, she concluded. She ended up slinging orders for half a dozen cats and who knows how many raccoons 24/7, the customer always right. “The other day, the raccoons rejected a kind of cookie; maybe it was oatmeal,” she said. “They took it and spit it out. So that’s off the list.” They don’t like stuffing or brussels sprouts either.<br>As much as Smith loves animals, the situation is not exactly working for her. Her kitchen smells like stale ammonia; the stairs to an abandoned seating area are dotted with scat. She can’t travel. She can’t sleep. She can’t host (people, I mean). She has had to get two rounds of rabies shots—scratched by accident, not on purpose, she swears. She could simply shut her doors at night, I suggest, or go on a vacation, encouraging the animals to fend for themselves. “I’m very neurotic,” she responds. “When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I think is: They’re hungry.”<br>Smith is living out the “If you give a mouse a cookie” parable. She is also unwittingly taking part in an extraordinary, unfolding ecological shift. Unlike many native species—ocelots, Shenandoah salamanders, Xerces blue butterflies, Key Largo wood rats—raccoons flourish in human settlements. Over time, their population has increased and their attitude toward the people in those settlements has changed. Urban raccoons have become more curious and less reactive. They have also started to develop distinctive traits common among tame species and uncommon among wild ones. The differences are so pronounced that some academics believe that raccoons are actively domesticating, much like the curious wolves that eventually transformed into pugs.<br>Last year, Frontiers in Zoology published a study on the phenomenon; mainstream media outlets picked up on it; social-media posts heralded the arrival of the “new American pet.” The research confirmed what many Americans suspected about the creatures rummaging through their recycling bins. More than that, it confirmed what many Americans wanted to believe about these floofy, fluffy cuddle-badgers, with their picklock fingers and Zorro masks. Raccoons aren’t just raccoons, after all. They’re up there with capybaras and deep-sea anglerfish as objects of unhinged human adoration. They’re trash pandas. They’re Rocket and Bandit. They’re Jimothy, a spry, deformed raccoon who has become so popular in Seattle that its city council officially decreed it “Jimothy Summer.”<br>Standing in Smith’s kitchen, surrounded by lasagna pans and scat, I half-felt that I was watching Darwinian evolution occurring in real time, and even wondered whether the raccoons of Long Island somehow wanted to domesticate. Then again, that might be nothing more than what a lot of Americans...