> Oddly, tameness has also long been associated with traits such as a shorter face, a smaller head, floppy ears and white patches on fur—a pattern that Charles Darwin noted in the 1800s.
Hmm, so evolutionary pressure of existing around humans makes animals cuter.
Experiment in taming foxes that relied on a single principle of selecting animals that react to humans with least fear and aggression resulted also in those morphological changes. I think it's more about selecting animals that retain youthful curiosity and other traits into their adult life. Youthful morphological features just tag along.
My guess: possibly co-evolution. The article subsequently describes the genetics behind things becoming cute - which would have been completely benign to our ancestors (the core of your question). However, those of our ancestors who completed domestication of these animals (by random chance) would have enjoyed more protection from predators, rodents, etc. Those of our ancestors who attempted to domesticate things without the mutations might have had bad companions at best, and would have been predated at worst. This would have provided evolutionary pressure to adopt animals that were showing early signs of domestication. What we call "cute" is merely "likely to cooperate with us."
Perhaps a combination of adaptableness, small size, prodigious reproduction, and cuteness saved some species from being wiped out whereas other species didn't fare so well once humans arrived and transformed their territory. Adapt to urban encroachment or face extinction.
I believe the main biological lever is retaining juvenile features as adults, physically as well as mentally (like with dogs). What we see as cute is an honest signal that they are more child-like: less aggressive, more trusting and pro-social.
I also think that this is the central cause of a wide variety of domestic/cute adaptations. There are too many separate features to believe that raccoons and dogs and cats and a dozen other species all select for these same elements independently.
I no longer have the book on hand, but read a few months ago that this correlation between juvenile traits and domestication was one of the main theses of Barrett's "Supernormal Stimuli" in Chapter 4. She cited a few studies of fox domestication [1], [2] and other works to support these theories.
Since humans associate cuteness with large eyes and small body size, nocturnal / twilight animals, like raccoons, sugar gliders, cats, squirrels, etc have a larger chance to be domesticated as pets.
Daytime, larger animals (e.g. sheep, goats, or even rabbits) have a larger chance to be domesticated as food.
> “I’d love to take those next steps and see if our trash pandas in our backyard are really friendlier than those out in the countryside,” she says.
Would they have to measure "biological" friendliness, comparing lab raised countryside-descended and city-descended raccoons? Domesticated animals can be very unfriendly. Feral cats for example.
Foxes too, generally. The average temperament tends to include curiosity, playfulness, and wariness but not moral fear of humans. People keep them as household pets so I'd call that domesticable. An experiment to speed up the process of fox domestication was undertaken. [0] Foxes tend to not be like almost all wolves (and many wolfdogs) which are reserved, not prone to social openness, and hard to read like American Akitas which makes them dangerous by dominance challenging, miscommunication, and untrustworthiness.
Raccoons have been living literally inside of houses for centuries.
One was kept as a pet in Jamestown Virginia in the 1600s. Another lived in the White House in the 1900s. Surely, not a decade has passed between have there been NO domesticated raccoons in the US? If living near humans changes animals, that started at least 25,000 years ago here in North America. Not recently.
My neighbors had a pet raccoon growing up. It lived inside but would come and go.
The people who wrote this article seem out of touch with the topic they chose to pretend to be experts about?
> The people who wrote this article seem out of touch with the topic they chose to pretend to be experts about?
This is quickly becoming the norm for experts, unfortunately. I keep seeing more an more people with educational expertise in something that they have zero hands-on or practical experience with.
I remember being at a social event once and chatting with someone who was a business professor at any Ivy League university. Making small talk, I asked him which companies he'd worked at, and he told me that he had gone the academic track and started teaching during and after getting his PhD (in exactly what I don't remember). I remember being stunned that students would pay over $60k a year to learn about business from someone who'd never worked for or started a business.
I think you’re mistaking slight natural adaption for domestication, and taking domestication for granted. Go into nature and try and train a wild wolf. Good luck! You can’t.
Domestication, in the way that we see having happened with dogs (and cattle, and chickens) takes a really long time.
We consider cats “domesticated” and yet demonstrably they are not. If they were much bigger, they’d eat us, and if set into wild, nearly all household cats immediately revert to feral.
I owned five ferrets once. Loved them so much, but came to the realization that there are animals that should be pets and animals that maybe shouldn’t (yet). I think we have many, many more generations before raccoons are at the same level as dogs.
> Surely, not a decade has passed between have there been NO domesticated raccoons in the US?
An animal of wild parentage that was raised by humans is tame but not domesticated. So no, there's aren't really domesticated racoons, only tame ones.
Domestication is a process that takes many generations. It is a selective breeding process more than anything else. Animals that are 1 generation away from wild ancestors aren't domesticated, by definition.
And the last category is feral animals, "that live in the wild but are descended from domesticated individuals.".
Just in time to spread a really awful parasite. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/human-cases-of-racco... "severe, frequently fatal, infections of the eyes, organs, and central nervous system. Those who survive are often left with severe neurological outcomes, including blindness, paralysis, loss of coordination, seizures, cognitive impairments, and brain atrophy"
On Facebook, there's been this running gag/joke/meme/whatever going for at least the last year, where anytime the official North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission page posts anything, a large portion of the comments quickly turn into a discussion of the merits (or lack thereof) of pet raccoons[1].
I don't know exactly how it started. Somebody innocently asked "How do I get a permit for a pet raccoon?" and the page replied "You can't, they are illegal in NC" or something prosaic like that I imagine. But it became a big "thing" and now raccoon talk is everywhere. The page controllers play along with it, which is part of why it's kept going so long I guess. But sometimes they'll get semi-serious and post something like
"Look, all joking aside, the reason pet raccoons are not allowed is because no matter how friendly raccoons look, they are wild animals, not domesticated, and they can be a hazard to you, and your family and <blah, etc, etc>".
Soooo... I'm just waiting to see somebody post this very article in a comment on that page with a note saying "Suck it, NCWRC!" (all in a spirit of good fun, of course).
[1]: or one or more of another of a small set of topics, including flounder, pet alligators, armadillos, UFO's, and the possibility that the person running the page is the product of secret government genetic engineering experiments involving "all of the above". It's... complicated.
EDIT:
Welp ,that took about as long as I expected. ROFL.
For thousands of years after domestication there were only a handful of dog breeds; hounds, sheepdogs etc, which were bred for their utility rather than appearance. It’s only in the last couple of hundred years that dog breeds have exploded.
> Raccoons are a rabies reservoir in the eastern United States, extending from Canada to Florida and as far west as the Appalachian Mountain range. Within these areas, 10% of raccoons that expose people or pets have rabies, making them one of the highest rabies-risks in the United States.
Domestication often involves lower intelligence. Particularly for farm animals.
Consider the statement above that tame raccoons need "TONS of engagement from their keepers because they get bored easily". Breeding that out means essentially a less curious, more complacent animal. Cows and sheep that easily figure out how to escape their paddocks are a liability.
Which category do you think is more clever: Wolf and coyote; or pug and chihuahua?
dog breeds considered "clever" often more closely resemble their wild ancestors. And they are often not "easy" breeds to own.
but are they edible though? I mean if they were domesticated fully, what would we do with them? I like my dogs thank you, ain't no way I'm having a coon for a pet.
Despite no one actually mentioning the white tr*sh cookbook ... I do not see the point behind raising racoons for food. They do NOT taste like chicken. How do you think your dogs would taste?
I like your dogs too, and ain't no way I would disrespect them... Pets are not food sources. But a coon.. . They seem nice enough until they fight over food ... Then they become _ <- insert unfavoroable political party.
From what I remember spending time on this topic, raccoons need super challenging locks as toys and TONS of engagement from their keepers because they get bored easily and bored raccoons == ultra destructive raccoons. Also, rabies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Somehow, it remind me of the Studio Ghibli anime Pom Poko, centering around the theme of the expansion of the Tokyo forcing Japanese Racoon to adopt human life.
Could domestication happened simple because we human expand too much?
It's interesting that there was no mention of the "cuteness" collection of traits that we find in common among infants of various species: short noses, big foreheads, and so forth.
So Kassel, Germany, may have hope to be less harassed in the future?
FYI, Kassel kinda is the so-called capitol of raccoons. 30k+ raccoons life there, according to estimates.
I certainly would not want to live there. It is crazy how these animals flock together and invade properties. And they aren't shy anymore due to the reverse positive reinforcement they receive by not killing them.
Yes, it is of course in Germany forbidden to kill an invading predatory species - even on your property. This is Germany 2025.
Racoons, even city's racoons are terrible beasts. Sure, they are friendly when they aren't upset; Take a treat away from the hands of the sweetest racoon and it will either pounce on you to retrieve it, scream bloody murder, or pounce and slash at you until you retreat.
Racoons, especially in the city, will kill and eat an older housecat or easy to access domestic chickens without hesitation.
Declawing them helps, but nature happens when a declawed racoon feels a call to roam and is outmatched by even a small hawk or possum.
I have a bunch of racoons in my yard every night. A year ago, on some whim, they decided to rip open the less than secure but 8 ft in the air vent grating for the chicken coop.
Some chickens made it, most in fact. But playtime involved ripping the heads off 3 of them.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 94.5 ms ] threadHmm, so evolutionary pressure of existing around humans makes animals cuter.
I wonder why we find these features endearing?
https://youtu.be/IZBAtd9rty8
Perhaps a combination of adaptableness, small size, prodigious reproduction, and cuteness saved some species from being wiped out whereas other species didn't fare so well once humans arrived and transformed their territory. Adapt to urban encroachment or face extinction.
It's a side effect, evolution made sure we take care of our offspring.
I no longer have the book on hand, but read a few months ago that this correlation between juvenile traits and domestication was one of the main theses of Barrett's "Supernormal Stimuli" in Chapter 4. She cited a few studies of fox domestication [1], [2] and other works to support these theories.
[1]: https://courses.washington.edu/anmind/Trut%20on%20the%20Russ...
[2] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(05)...
Daytime, larger animals (e.g. sheep, goats, or even rabbits) have a larger chance to be domesticated as food.
Larger head-size relative to the body, larger eyes, smaller jaws and noses, longer limbs, etc.
Interesting parallels across species towards less aggression, greater pro-social behavior, more physical traits that shout "trust me, I'm harmless."
Almost like pro-social, intelligent team co-operation is a huge advantage compared to solo predatory behavior.
Those features activates the same areas of our brain that babies' faces activate.
Feeling that something is "cute" is the evolutionary way that our brain is using to make us care of our kids.
Would they have to measure "biological" friendliness, comparing lab raised countryside-descended and city-descended raccoons? Domesticated animals can be very unfriendly. Feral cats for example.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
As crepuscular animals, they are very, very afraid of humans.
One was kept as a pet in Jamestown Virginia in the 1600s. Another lived in the White House in the 1900s. Surely, not a decade has passed between have there been NO domesticated raccoons in the US? If living near humans changes animals, that started at least 25,000 years ago here in North America. Not recently.
My neighbors had a pet raccoon growing up. It lived inside but would come and go.
The people who wrote this article seem out of touch with the topic they chose to pretend to be experts about?
This is quickly becoming the norm for experts, unfortunately. I keep seeing more an more people with educational expertise in something that they have zero hands-on or practical experience with.
I remember being at a social event once and chatting with someone who was a business professor at any Ivy League university. Making small talk, I asked him which companies he'd worked at, and he told me that he had gone the academic track and started teaching during and after getting his PhD (in exactly what I don't remember). I remember being stunned that students would pay over $60k a year to learn about business from someone who'd never worked for or started a business.
It primarily says they can now observe physical changes associated with domestication.
Also, keeping a wild animal as a pet does not domesticate it.
Domestication, in the way that we see having happened with dogs (and cattle, and chickens) takes a really long time.
We consider cats “domesticated” and yet demonstrably they are not. If they were much bigger, they’d eat us, and if set into wild, nearly all household cats immediately revert to feral.
I owned five ferrets once. Loved them so much, but came to the realization that there are animals that should be pets and animals that maybe shouldn’t (yet). I think we have many, many more generations before raccoons are at the same level as dogs.
An animal of wild parentage that was raised by humans is tame but not domesticated. So no, there's aren't really domesticated racoons, only tame ones.
Domestication is a process that takes many generations. It is a selective breeding process more than anything else. Animals that are 1 generation away from wild ancestors aren't domesticated, by definition.
And the last category is feral animals, "that live in the wild but are descended from domesticated individuals.".
Raccoons while cute, smart, interesting, etc., should not be considered as pets as long as this parasite exists.
On Facebook, there's been this running gag/joke/meme/whatever going for at least the last year, where anytime the official North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission page posts anything, a large portion of the comments quickly turn into a discussion of the merits (or lack thereof) of pet raccoons[1].
I don't know exactly how it started. Somebody innocently asked "How do I get a permit for a pet raccoon?" and the page replied "You can't, they are illegal in NC" or something prosaic like that I imagine. But it became a big "thing" and now raccoon talk is everywhere. The page controllers play along with it, which is part of why it's kept going so long I guess. But sometimes they'll get semi-serious and post something like
"Look, all joking aside, the reason pet raccoons are not allowed is because no matter how friendly raccoons look, they are wild animals, not domesticated, and they can be a hazard to you, and your family and <blah, etc, etc>".
Soooo... I'm just waiting to see somebody post this very article in a comment on that page with a note saying "Suck it, NCWRC!" (all in a spirit of good fun, of course).
[1]: or one or more of another of a small set of topics, including flounder, pet alligators, armadillos, UFO's, and the possibility that the person running the page is the product of secret government genetic engineering experiments involving "all of the above". It's... complicated.
EDIT:
Welp ,that took about as long as I expected. ROFL.
https://fogbeam.com/racoons_domesticating.png
> Raccoons are a rabies reservoir in the eastern United States, extending from Canada to Florida and as far west as the Appalachian Mountain range. Within these areas, 10% of raccoons that expose people or pets have rabies, making them one of the highest rabies-risks in the United States.
https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/php/protecting-public-health/inde...
Consider the statement above that tame raccoons need "TONS of engagement from their keepers because they get bored easily". Breeding that out means essentially a less curious, more complacent animal. Cows and sheep that easily figure out how to escape their paddocks are a liability.
Which category do you think is more clever: Wolf and coyote; or pug and chihuahua?
dog breeds considered "clever" often more closely resemble their wild ancestors. And they are often not "easy" breeds to own.
I like your dogs too, and ain't no way I would disrespect them... Pets are not food sources. But a coon.. . They seem nice enough until they fight over food ... Then they become _ <- insert unfavoroable political party.
Tasty, no.
From what I remember spending time on this topic, raccoons need super challenging locks as toys and TONS of engagement from their keepers because they get bored easily and bored raccoons == ultra destructive raccoons. Also, rabies.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baylisascaris_procyonis
If they were domesticated, you’d just get them vaccinated at the vet.
It astounds me, that government still doesn't want to kill say 20k of these invaders.
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.
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.
Could domestication happened simple because we human expand too much?
https://www.bbcearth.com/news/the-code-for-cuteness
It's pretty interesting to see their Instagram stories.
FYI, Kassel kinda is the so-called capitol of raccoons. 30k+ raccoons life there, according to estimates.
I certainly would not want to live there. It is crazy how these animals flock together and invade properties. And they aren't shy anymore due to the reverse positive reinforcement they receive by not killing them.
Yes, it is of course in Germany forbidden to kill an invading predatory species - even on your property. This is Germany 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DJXsI_A5DU
https://www.kassel.de/buerger/sicherheit_und_ordnung/tiersch...
Along with 200k+ of the most violent species on the planet: humans.
Racoons, especially in the city, will kill and eat an older housecat or easy to access domestic chickens without hesitation.
Declawing them helps, but nature happens when a declawed racoon feels a call to roam and is outmatched by even a small hawk or possum.
Some chickens made it, most in fact. But playtime involved ripping the heads off 3 of them.
They can be quite sinister.