Ologies with Alie Ward - Raccoonology (PROCYONIDS) with A Gaze of Raccoonologists

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

Here we go: SIX more raccoon experts, because one episode is not enough for the wonders of these terrific trash bandits. Revel in the raccoon love and hear about presidential pets, neuronal density, why raccoonologists walk out on the job, their fabled intelligence, how Aesop factors into raccoonology, and the comfort of the male gaze?  Also, treat yourself and your timeline to an upgrade by following these wildlife experts:Hannah J. Griebling, MSc on Twitteranimalcognitionlab.orgKelly E. Lane-deGraaf, PhD on TwitterJessica M. Andersen on Twitterblueridgewildlifectr.orgLauren A. Stanton, Ph.D. on Twitterlaurenastanton.wixsite.com/cognitive-ecologyJessi Knudsen Castañeda on Twitter, Instagram and YouTubeanimalwonders.orgJennifer Colbourne on TwitterDonations went to: Center for One Health, Blue Ridge Wildlife Center, and Animal WondersMore episode resources & linksSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts & bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, totes, masks… Follow @ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @alieward on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. Dwyer  

Oh, hi. Hey, it's that neighbor who just still needs some tips on how to start weightlifting. Alli Ward, it's me. I'm back. Part two, raccoons as promised. So part one, last week, it features North America's most lauded and trusted raccoon expert Dr. Suzanne McDonald of York University. She is on deck. When everyone has raccoon questions, they call her. We covered brain worms. We talked about their big, bushy, beautiful bottoms if you should keep them as pets. So many noises that they make. We talked life advice, why they thrive in your driveway, onion repellent, bisexual iconography, how many are over our heads, just napping on tree limbs on any given day. We talked about their two month gestation periods,

dick bones, and how being a prosynologist means just getting to watch hours of nighttime footage of them eating chicken bones in your backyard. But before we get into it, part two, I just want to thank everyone at patreon.com slash allergies for supporting the show costs as little as a dollar a month to submit questions to the ologists. You get to be also the first to know and see behind the scenes photos whenever I take an ambulance ride or have an ER trip in a concussion. Doesn't happen often, but it happened last Thursday. So thanks, Patreon. You knew what was going on first. There are more details on my Instagram and at the secret at the end of the episode. But I want to thank you also to everyone who passes along these episodes and talks about ologies over walks and

dinners and sends links to friends and who rates and subscribes, of course, who refuse. I read all of them, even though my screen time has been medically limited this week as my brain heals. But thank you for leaving this fresh as hell one. Momo Joseph, who wrote four out of five stars, because episodes are skipping or repeating throughout their glitches. They wrote, I really do love this podcast, but the editing needs a little help. The most recent episode on bad knees had a lot of skipping and repeating throughout. And that review, Momo Joseph, I so appreciate the honesty, made me a little sad. Then it made me go down a research hole. And it turns out we're fine. We did make one tiny mistake or two in a couple recent episodes, but the skipping and

repeating, that's a streaming issue. And it means that your Wi-Fi is body. And to download it before you go on a road trip or a walk. We did recently change from one hosting platform to another. And so we followed up with Stitcher and Simplecast. They're looking into it too. But essentially, a lot of podcasts are having these problems recently and downloading the episode instead of streaming can help in case you're finding that episodes are glitching. It's not just us. And it's not our fault, which felt great to hear. Not a big deal. Thank you to everyone who helped us troubleshoot. Thank you, Momo Joseph, for letting us know. And we're sorry for the little mistakes we have made. But yeah, it's a streaming issue. So a big shrug on that. We are looking into it

if there's anything we can do about it. Anyway, but as promised, more raccoons, more facts, more thoughts on what this ology should be called, and more prosynologists and raccoonologists, including Hannah J. Gribbling, Dr. Kelly Elaine DeGraft, Jessica M. Anderson, Dr. Lauren Stanton, Jesse Knudsen Castaneda, all of them are she-her, and Jennifer Colburn, who is cool with she or they. And honestly, what a gaze. What a nursery of experts you're about to meet. So we have interspersed this episode with more facts too. So just once again, hold on to those big butts with your tiny hands, which we know aren't actually hands, but paws for more minds and more wonderful people who are all prosynologists and raccoonologists part two.

Since this is a little departure from the usual format, I'm going to let them introduce themselves. Hi, I'm Hannah Gribbling, and I'm a PhD student in Sarah Benson Amrum's Animal Behavior and Cognition Lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. And I am interested in how raccoon behavior and cognition varies within the city of Vancouver and how this variation in their cognitive abilities could potentially impact or be impacted by the human perceptions, interactions, and conflicts that humans may have with urban raccoons. My name is Kelly Lane DeGraft, and I am an associate professor of biology at Fontbonne University, a small liberal arts college with a social justice mission in St. Louis, Missouri. And I work with raccoons.

This is my dream job. So in my lab, we are really interested in understanding how human activities affect wildlife and their parasites. So specifically, we look at raccoons and their population genetics and genetic diversity, relatedness, etc. We look at their parasites and we look at their parasites, population, genetics, and diversity. Listen, sometimes you have to look for roundworms and raccoon poop for your job. I think that rules. But we also look at things like environmental contamination and raccoon behavior all across St. Louis city and county. So we look at St. Louis in particular as a model system because St. Louis, unfortunately, has a long history with racism. And that has really shaped how people live and where people live and where

resources are allocated within the community. And that affects how we see and how raccoons see and use our own environment. Hi, I'm Dr. Lauren Stanton. I'm really interested in how raccoons use their cognitive abilities to thrive in urban environments. As a graduate student, I studied the learning and problem solving abilities of raccoons in the city of Laramie, Wyoming, using puzzles and automated feeding devices, similar to Skinner boxes. You can see her 2017 study entitled adaptation of the ASOP's fable paradigm for use with raccoons, considerations for future application in non-avian and non-primate species, which a la the fable, the crow in the picture, involves stuffing a marshmallow into a narrow, clear glass just at a reach of tiny raccoony

hands and then providing the raccoons rocks to displace the water to reach the marshmallow and then eat it with those hands. And according to Dr. Stanton, raccoons performed differently than corvids and human children did in previous studies of ASOP's fable, but they found raccoons to be innovative in many aspects of this task. Way to go. I'm now a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, and in a few months I will begin working on a new research project with raccoons in the San Francisco Bay area, where I will be focused on understanding how socio-ecological factors, including social inequity, shape the behavior and cognition of urban carnivores. My name is Jessica Anderson. I am a wildlife rehabilitator, and I work at the Blue Ridge

Wildlife Center in Boyce, and we work with a variety of wildlife, but raccoons included with the purpose of rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing them back to the wild. I'm Jesse Knudson-Casnieta. I care for a non-releasable raccoon named Ringo at an animal rescue organization called Animal Wonders. We are located in Montana, and we teach informal science education about the animals at our rescue center. My name is Jennifer Colburn. Starting off my graduate studies with raccoons is what got me into what some refer to as bin animals. Excuse me. Animals that live in our cities and eat our garbage. I'm fascinated by how these bin animals are adapting to our cities because you can see evolution in action. I was raised a young earth creationist

and thought evolution was some sort of conspiracy theory, so learning the process of evolution really blew my mind in university, and I've been obsessed with it since. Some know me as the raccoonologist on Twitter, and technically, I guess I coined the term raccoonology. So we went over this in part one when Dr. Suzanne McDonald was not having the term raccoonologist. No. No, okay. No, that's ridiculous. She was not having it. But around these parts, you know what, I'm open to ideas. And honestly, I've been following Jennifer on Twitter forever for years for their raccoon content. In my mind, they are the original raccoonologist. So let's hear why theseologists would call what what. You see, initially, I was drawn to raccoons because they

seemed a lot like primates. Actually, it's been speculated they fill that niche in North America. I mean, they're omnivorous, and they exploit a wide variety of food. They live in trees. They have thumbs, which is very unusual for a carnivore, though they're not opposable. So they're not quite like our thumbs, but they can do a lot with their hands. Anyway, since I couldn't call myself a primatologist, I decided that I was a raccoonologist. It's not unanimous, but she's not alone. In terms of what allergy I think about raccoons, from a purely phylogenetic standpoint, I think procyonology makes the most sense. From the perspective, slightly more unprofessional, admittedly, of thinking about sort of their whole reputation, probably something more like crafty

buggerology would be more more fitting. I like it. But for the work that I do and the lens that I look at raccoons with, I think something more akin to urban idology might actually be the most fitting. They do really well, of course, in their own evolved ecosystem. But we know that raccoons that live in cities are incredibly witty, and they have evolved to really thrive around humans. And so I think acknowledging their love and ability to thrive with people is probably real. So a few ideas for an ology's episode on raccoons could be raccoonology, or maybe proscyonodology, or even bandodology. You know, there are a lot of good ones to consider. Raccoons give us a lot of really good material to work with in general.

I think the study of raccoons should simply be called raccoonology. I think the study of raccoons should be proscyonodology, and that would include both North American raccoons as well as the lesser known raccoon species that are found down in the tropics as well. I think that the ology should be called proscyonology. It's a little bit of a mouthful, but proscyon is their genus, and it actually means early or before dog. So there we have it, a bunch of different but informed opinions. And you know what, this one, we're just going to call it raccoonology. How's that? Great? Great. For more on the word raccoon, and its etymology and significance in indigenous cultures of the

North Americas, pick up the book Raccoon by Daniel Heath Justice, who is a Cherokee Nation writer and a professor of English and Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia. And the book description got me. It's like next to my to read list. From intergalactic misanthropes and to spoilers of ancient temples to coveted hunting quarry, unpredictable pet, and symbols of wilderness and racist stereotype alike, raccoon offers a lively consideration of this misunderstood outlaw species. So if you need a book on raccoons, again, that was Daniel Heath Justice's book, Raccoon, very easy to remember. Now what obscure raccoon facts do our ologists hold dear?

Let's have self-described raccoon evangelist Hannah start. My favorite weird fact about them is that raccoons have an unexpectedly high concentration of neurons in their cat-sized brains. And their neuronal density is actually comparable to that of primates. And I have a second fun fact because I couldn't resist. And I know their front feet get a lot of press and attention, but their hind feet are actually pretty remarkable too. They can rotate their hind feet in order to climb down trees headfirst. And they're one of the few species of their size that's able to do so. Hannah continues. My very favorite thing about raccoons is how they challenge and push against the boundaries that we've tried to place between

us humans and nature. Raccoons will do this both literally and figuratively. Literally, they will get into our garbage, start living in our homes and attics. And they also do this figuratively by challenging our perceptions of ourselves as the cognitively superior animal. We have a difficult time outsmarting them, and that's something that makes them fun, but of course sometimes challenging to work with. Kelly chimes in. Raccoons are of course true omnivores, but man, they love a good campfire-sized marshmallow, those really big ones. And if I'm being completely honest, they are ridiculously adorable to watch eat them. A favorite thing of mine about raccoons, raccoons sit in a kind

of weird intersection of everyone thinks that they are both adorable and a pest species, right? I mean, they're little masks in their little hands. You know, kids love them. They're so, so cute. And as adults, we see them as a big pest. And I know that that is in large part because they have evolved the ability to thrive in our spaces. And we tend to sort of break animals up into things that can thrive with us, become pest species very quickly, and things that cannot become vulnerable to extinction, sadly. But I do think it's kind of a funny, ironic, not funny, haha, thing that raccoons occupy that niche. Jesse from Animal Wonders in Montana, who has a really great YouTube channel with all kinds of wildlife rehab videos,

waxes affectionately at their paws, which don't have proper thumbs, but we all call them hands anyway, because come on, my favorite thing about raccoons is their hands. They just, they have to touch everything. And the pads are really, really soft. Also, they have about 10 times more nerves in their hands than humans do. So I can kind of see why they're so obsessed with the touching. The weirdest fact about raccoons is that for a mammal in the order carnivora, they have to be fairly smart in order to catch prey and survive. But their neuron density is impressively more comparable to primates than to dogs or cats. Here, Jennifer talks about a raccoonologist named Stan Garrett, who they say eventually got so fed up with the challenges of crafty

buggerology that he switched to mostly just researching coyotes. He's like, I'm out. You know, you know, who doesn't have hand-like paws? Coyotes. I'm out. But Jennifer notes a study of his on raccoon sociability or what it takes to join a presided posse. Turns out that the males tend to hang out in groups of three or four. It's not that unusually animal kingdom for male animals to bond together. So there were several plausible reasons that he tested. Actually, he ran a bunch of studies and he just can't figure out why these males hang out together. They're not related, so they're not trying to increase their fitness. They aren't making these coalitions to back each other up during fights. They aren't sequestering females during mating season. Why are they hanging

out? No one knows. But personally, I like to speculate that they're just bros who enjoy each other's company. So from part one, we learned a group of raccoons is a gaze. So this is literally the mystery of the male gaze. Male gaze. This is typical of raccoon research, though. You make a prediction based on these robust models and the results, and we're likely the opposite of what you thought they'd be. We really just have a lot to learn. I mean, for my own master's thesis, they did not perform at all like we expected them to. In fact, they did rather poorly, though we did have a small sample size. To be honest, though, my feelings that raccoons aren't even that quote, intelligent so much as persistent. My impression is that they'll just work on a problem until

eventually it's solved much longer than monkeys will. I've taken that motto into my PhD. I don't have to be the smartest. I just have to keep working at something until eventually it clicks. Oh, I love that so much. Let's repeat that raccoon based life advice from Jennifer Colburn, aka raccoonologist. I don't have to be the smartest. I just have to keep working at something until eventually it clicks. Okay, so Jessica from Blue Ridge Wildlife Center also has to hand it to these critters. Wait, you know what? I should probably pause here to take some money and throw it chaotically in the direction of raccoons. For this episode, we're actually going to be splitting donations between different wildlife rehab programs that these raccoonologists work with,

including the Center for One Health via Dr. Kelly Landegraf, Blue Ridge Wildlife Center via Jessica Anderson, and Jesse Knudsen Castaneda's AnimalWonders.org. Those donations were made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay, yes. Back to Jessica from Blue Ridge Wildlife Center. Fun or obscure fact about raccoons would probably be in their paws. I know a lot of people already know that raccoons like to dip a lot of their food and items into water. A lot of people think, oh, they're washing their food. But in reality, raccoons rely on their sense of touch way more than most animals. And they actually have like four to five times more neurons in their paws. And over two thirds of their brain is actually dedicated to interpreting the data from their

touch and from their paws. So by wetting these items, they can actually improve how their paws are feeling and interpreting every kind of piece and every surface of the item that they're feeling. And it helps them interpret what they have, how to grab it, if it's edible, if it's something they recognize. And to me, that's really incredible for an animal who also has decent vision, hearing, and smell as well. After working with raccoons for the last seven years, my favorite thing about them is probably just how interactive and smart they are. We really have to stay on top of our game to keep these animals enriched when they're in captivity, to prevent them from destroying things or getting into further trouble. If you have a sheet anywhere near an enclosure where a raccoon

can stick their arm out and grab it, guaranteed that sheet is going to be pulled as far into the enclosure by the next morning, torn to shreds, bitten, maybe even looped through other parts of the enclosure as well. So we really go to great lengths to keep these guys engaged with their environment, lots of different textures, substrates, things to climb, toys, and things like that to make them really work for their food, different sleeping areas like hammocks, tires, barrels, stuff like that, just things that are going to allow them to interact with what's in their enclosure versus giving them time to sort of figure out how they can destroy the rest of the enclosure as well. You know who knows a lot about this? The White House. So in 1926,

President Calvin Coolidge was sent a live Mississippi raccoon as a gift to kill and eat for Thanksgiving dinner. And he was like, nah, I think I'll just name her Rebecca and give her an engraved collar that reads White House Raccoon. They let her run through the West Wing, Rebecca attended Easter egg rolls on the lawn, cuddled by the first lady on a leash, Rebecca even ended up inhabiting a small outdoor home located atop a tree stump on the White House lawn. And then later, Duda Mayhem was transferred to the National Zoo in DC, where she quickly died, because she was like, what the fuck, where's the bone China? Where's the press attention? Hello? I need long drapes to scale. This sucks. The whole thing is very sad. But as long as we're

in a historical groove, Dr. Lord Stanton dishes up more lore. So one weird fact about raccoons is that in the early 1900s, raccoons were proposed as a model system for studies in animal cognition. But psychologists had a hard time managing raccoons in the lab, because raccoons were pretty good at breaking out of cages, and they're just generally a handful. So for decades, researchers pretty much abandoned raccoons as a study species. I love working with raccoons. Raccoons are just so expressive. And there's so many interesting things about them. The more I study raccoons, the more questions I have about them. They really have a mind of their own. And despite some of the frustrations I've experienced trying to study raccoons in the wild, I really admire them as a

species. And I enjoy getting to know them as individuals through my work. My favorite thing about raccoons is actually a tie between two things. So the first is their dexterous for pause. I am totally obsessed with how raccoons use their for pause to perceive and interact with the world around them. And I think it's something that we as humans can relate to, right? So if you've ever had to reach into the bottom of your bag to find a pen, or you reach far back into a cabinet to, you know, you're feeling around what you're looking for, that's a very raccoon thing of us to do. And my second favorite thing about raccoons is their social behavior. I really enjoy watching videos of wild raccoons interacting with each other, like watching two individuals greet

each other or watching juveniles play, or even watching two adults kind of square off against each other and try to exert dominance over one another. It's really fascinating. You know, I think we've always considered raccoons to be a rather solitary kind of cryptic species. But more and more, we're beginning to realize that raccoons have a social life, especially raccoons that live in high densities and cities. I mean, they're cute. They're smart. They're happy eating leftover spaghetti. And they're everywhere. Do you want a presidential pet? No? Okay, so you did listen to part one. Good. Jennifer reiterates in case you had your head in the compost bin and you missed it. Just one final thing I want to add, because I see so much of this on social media,

raccoons are not pets. Not only is it illegal in most countries, but they'll put your pet down if they catch you with one because of the rabies risk. They also carry this horrible disease called raccoon roundworm that can burrow into human brains. So like, really, it's just a bad idea. I honestly don't know what anyone would want a raccoon as a pet because they can get into everything. Your stuff is going to be destroyed and you're going to get bitten a lot. They're not domesticated pets. If you find babies, just contact a wildlife rehab, which by the way, really have any government funding. So please consider supporting your local rehabs. They're usually volunteers working around the clock and breeding season and desperate for help.

We owe them big time for sacrificing so much for our wild neighbors. These will all be linked at the website in the show notes. You can find me on Twitter as Lauren underscore Stanton underscore. If you guys want to follow my personal rehabilitation and animal opinions, you can follow me on Twitter at Jess underscore in the wild, as well as on Instagram at Jess in the wild. Or you can follow my facility that I work at, which is just Blue Ridge Wildlife Center across all platforms. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, even. So if you guys are interested in learning more about wildlife rehabilitation, wildlife medicine, we do post

a lot of our stories and patients on there as well. And Jesse and Hannah and Dr. Lane DeGruff. You can follow our animal adventures by searching animal wonders Montana on YouTube or Instagram. Thanks. You can find me on Twitter at Hannah greebling. You spell my last name G R I E bling. Thank you. In terms of social media, you can find me on Twitter at Dr. K L D G or the Graham at Dr. Lane DeGruff two A's one F. And in terms of projects, if there are any local St. Louis community members that would be interested in environmental racism, one health and raccoons, I would love to hear from them to get involved. Thanks. So ask resourceful raccoonologists really basic questions, because just like the raccoons,

prosyanologists may be all around you hiding in plain sight. They may or may not be sleeping in a tree. We don't know. But there's a link in the show notes to the oligous accounts. So you can follow them, make more raccoony pals. Plus, there's links to the recipients of this week's donations and to our website where we have more links, you can follow us at instagram.com slash oligies for all the raccoon memes you care to gaze at. I'm on Instagram too at Ali Ward. I'm posting some intermittent concussion updates there for those who are like, what? We're on Twitter at oligies. And I met Ali Ward on Twitter too. I'm sometimes on TikTok at Ali underscore oligies. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the oligies podcast Facebook group to Shannon and Bonnie

for merch help. Susan Hale and Noel Dilworth for oligies business and scheduling. Emily White of the Wordery, who does our professional transcripts. Caleb Patton bleeps, the swears, and those are up at our website at aliward.com slash oligies slash extras. Kelly, our Dwyer works on my website and is available to work on yours if you need her. She's linked in the show notes. Stephen Ray Morris and Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas of Mind Jam Media work on Smologies, which are classroom friendly edits of our classic episodes that come out about every two weeks or so. And lead editor and primary husband is Jared Sleeper, also of Mind Jam Media, who has been wonderful, literally hid my phone and texted all my friends and family to let them know I was in

the ER with a concussion. It wasn't supposed to look at screens, which is what I'm doing right now. I'm doing my best here, folks. Nick Thorburn, by the way, made the theme music. If you listen through the credits, I will tell you a secret. And this week's secret is that I had been having an easy time since last Thursday. I've been like resting a lot, head feels okay. I have been staring at screens all day just to put this episode up and I have a headache and I'm really tired. So I also tried to line up a concussion expert. So we'll see if we can get that in the hopper for you for next week. Either way, I'm literally going to go back to bed now. Okay, bye-bye.