The Current - Raccoons: Pests or Pets

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

For many, the raccoon is a pest, a pesky critter getting into your garbage, your attic, anywhere it doesn't belong. But for some these little trash pandas are pets, not pests. Turns out there's new science to support the idea that raccoons are moving towards domestication. Hear from a raccoon owner about the joys of raising these wild creatures - and what the science tells us about how humans are helping move raccoons from outside nuisance to inside companions.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Those are the sounds of baby raccoons. Yes, they're very cute. And while they're cute, maybe you have cursed these little guys after they have peeled open your garbage cans or maybe made a nest in your attic or under the porch. Raccoons are often considered. to be a pest. But just hear me out here for a second. Would you ever consider one as a pet?

Hi guys, it's Sarah. In today's video, we're going to be walking our pet raccoon, Piper. Walking a pet raccoon can be much more complicated than just walking a dog for many reasons, but mostly because they are much more independent, so they're not as keen to just simply follow you. Yes, she did say she was taking a raccoon for a walk. That is Sarah Time showing off one of her pet raccoons. Sarah and her husband Mitchell, run the social media accounts for Tito the raccoon. Now, Tito isn't in their home anymore, but they do have three other pet raccoons and all these videos are very popular with hundreds of thousands of fans on social media. The views of those videos will probably get a boost now because there is new science showing that raccoons might be moving toward domestication

like dogs and cats did thousands of years ago. We'll hear more about that research in a moment, but first, Sarah, time is in South Carolina. Sarah, good morning. Good morning, Matt. How are you? Well, I'm well. I think the obvious question is, why would you have a raccoon as a pet? So, you know, it didn't happen intentionally. We definitely didn't go out into the forest seeking to bring a raccoon into our home. But sadly, all of our raccoons were orphaned for one reason or another, and we brought them in. You brought them in, like brought them into the house. Yes, we did. All when they were babies, our oldest raccoon, Cheeto, he was found on the side of the road, sadly next to his mother who had just been hit by a car.

So we took him home and I've been taking care of them ever since. We should say in most parts of this country, it is not legal to have a pet raccoon. You're not allowed to do that. You're in South Carolina. So were there hoops that you needed to jump through to be able to ensure that Cheeto and others would be allowed to stay in the house? So every state in the U.S. is very different. And our laws here in South Carolina didn't require any sort of permitting process, surprisingly. although in most states they are either completely illegal or you would have to get a permit to have

them. But no, not here. Okay. Again, this is a dumb question, but what does it like to have a raccoon in the house? So there's a lot of good things and a lot of bad things. They're good. They're very fun animals. They each have their own personality. So I have one that's very cuddly and very affectionate with me. And that's a lot of fun. But there is definitely a lot of cons as well. They're very smart and independent creatures and there was a lot of work that we needed to do to our home to raccoon proof it so that it was safe for them and a good environment to raise them in and also to keep you know our belongings safe from them as well you say cuddly let me do the raccoons the cuddle or that one that that's cuddly does it cuddle up with you or something or

what oh yeah if she she would sleep in my bed every single night if i let her she she cuddles up right next to my neck and she'll take a nap there and she loves it the raccoons that i know like the one that lives on my deck are the ones that have tried to get into my chimney are trying to destroy my house, it feels like. So what do you need to do to train a raccoon? So, you know, every raccoon is different, just like all cats and dogs have different personalities. But our raccoons are all thankfully very food motivated. So if we dangle a treat in front of them, they're very smart. They pick up on what they want us to do to earn that treat. Like what? So the tricks they know actually are they could sit. We've taught them to hold things on command.

that we taught them to spin. You said you had to raccoon-proof your house. What did you have to do? And what were the concerns around what the raccoons could do if things weren't hidden away, for example? We have a lot of baby gates in our house walking off access to certain rooms that they should not be getting into. For instance, we've had to block off our bathroom because one time our original raccoon Tito got in there and he learned how to turn on the faucet. However, he did not know how to turn off the faucet. And he grabbed the tullapaper that was nearby and started shoving it down the drain,

which then caused the sink to overfill and leak into the downstairs. So we had to block off access to running water. Of course, they have their water dishes of plenty because they love to put their hands in water. We've also had to lock off our cabinets in our pantry. And we rarely keep any items lying around because raccoons truly can just make a toy out of anything. I mean, they're known, at least here, as trash pandas. So they get into the garbage? Yeah.

So we also have our trash can locked off. Otherwise, they would love to go in there and find a little snack. Can I go back just to the first question, which is, given everything, why would you keep the raccoon in the house? I mean, I get that they were abandoned, that maybe they were orphaned, or what have you. But there are rescue organizations that would take those animals if they had been, you know, left on their own. Why did you think it was a good idea to keep them in the house?

Yeah. So actually, with our first raccoon, we did. try to reach out to various rehab organizations, but a lot of them are, you know, they don't have that many resources. And we had a hard time hearing back from them for them to be able to take in this baby raccoon. And at a certain point, he had just gotten assimilated to us. And at a certain point, you can't then release raccoon back into the wild. And unfortunately, raccoons are one of the most surrendered animals at rehab centers because they are such difficult pets to take care of. So at this point, we would not be able to just release him into the wild.

You say on your website that you don't recommend most people get a pet raccoon. Why would you say that, given the fact that you have three raccoons in your house right now? Our biggest thing is, yes, we post these cute raccoon videos and pictures, but we're never trying to convince anyone else to get a pet raccoon. We are big on responsible pet ownership, and that's the case whether you want a dog, a cat, a fish, a ferret, a bird, or a raccoon. You need to have a pet that matches your lifestyle and your energy level and your home environment. And I just think for most people, a raccoon would be a poor choice because they're such high-maintenance animals. You also have cats, right?

We do, yes. Do the cats and the raccoons get along? They get along, but they're not necessarily like best friends. They have very different play styles. So it is great that we have several raccoons because their energy levels match each other and they get to play with each other. they love to like wrestle and be a little you know I guess aggressive is like too harsh of a word but they love to you know just horse around whereas the cats don't as much you know they'd rather bat a little ball or something like that we mentioned tito who was your first pet raccoon and he's been he's been gone for for a few years now what happened to tito yes he has so when we moved houses he got outside and he was our original raccoon and we would always take him hiking and camping and he loved going around catching his own and crayfish and whatnot. And so when we moved, he got outside and he didn't come back in. And we just, we're hoping for the best that he's out there thriving, catching his crayfish, and

living his best little raccoon life. So you don't see him anymore? No, we haven't seen him since. Does what happened to Tito maybe give you pause about raising what really is a wild animal as a pet? I mean, maybe he wanted to be back out in the wild. You know, there's potential for that. Like I did mention earlier, all the raccoons have very different personalities from each other. And we take our other ones outside on walks, but they're very much wanting to come back inside that we joke around that they're indoor cats, especially our raccoon Piper. She loves the AC. She loves our couch and she loves being indoors. And honestly, I look at her some days. I'm like, I can't believe that you're even born outside because she's assimilated herself very well. How do people just find that?

How do people react? I mean, you have it like in a harness or something like that on a leash when you're taking the raccoon for a walk down the street. How do people respond? They're always a little shocked, for sure. I could imagine. Right. People want to pet them. We, you know, most of the time, just ask them to stay away because they're actually kind of scaredy cats. But, you know, after a certain nighttime, everyone's just like, oh, that's Sarah Mitchell with their raccoons.

Sarah, it's good to talk to you about this. Thank you very much. Yeah, no problem. Sarah Time has three pet raccoons. She and her husband run the social media account for Tito, the raccoon. She's not alone in this. I am reliably informed that the 30th U.S. President, Calvin Coolidge, and his wife, the first lady Grace Coolidge, a raccoon as a pet. Rebecca was its name. Well, ahoy there. This is Chris Thiele. How are you? You aren't by chance in need of a little

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Christina Sluca is a PhD graduate in the Ecology Program at the University of Wyoming. Her team published a paper earlier this year showing that raccoons may indeed be evolving toward domestication. Christina, good morning to you. Hi, good morning, Matt. How are you? I'm well. Would you guys? get a raccoon as a pet? I would not. Certainly not, yeah. But you love raccoons, right?

Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah, I've been working with both live trapping and tagging and releasing raccoons here in Laramie to look at some of their behavior, as well as looking at some of their skulls in museums. So they are fantastic creatures. They're very, very interesting. What do you find most interesting about them? They are little, kind of like little enigmas. So very interestingly, we don't have a whole lot of research on raccoons at all in any sense of the word.

So we don't really know the extent of how smart they are. We don't really know a whole lot about how they're adapting to urban habitats. We don't really know a whole lot about how their sociology might change if they're particularly social at all. So it's fascinating that they're everywhere, and yet we have very little, you know, rigorous scientific study of them. So one of the things that you've been looking at, as I said, is whether raccoons are. evolving toward domestication. How do you begin to determine that? Part of this is around the shape of their skull, right? Right, exactly. So both my study and the other study that's going around, very popular right now, we looked at museum specimens. So we've got raccoons in museums that were

collected as far back as like the 1880s. And so we can actually look at raccoon skulls and the shape of that skull from the 1880s to now and really see how they have changed with urbanization over that time. So you can imagine our cities have grown a lot since the 1880s. And in that process, we just looked at pretty much every aspect of shape of the skull. So I think the best comparison is if you think about a pug compared to a wolf, those animals obviously have very different skull shapes. And so what we're looking for is some of those aspects of skull shape that changes not only in dogs compared to wolves, but other domesticated species like horses and goats and pigs. And kind of across the board, there's these set of characteristics that go along with

domestication. And that's really what we are looking for. And so have you seen a change in the shape of the raccoon skulls over time? Yes. So we found that instead of some of their skull shape being really connected to diet, which is what we expect in a lot of other like large carnivores, like large cats, wolves, things like that, we actually found that some of their teeth are actually getting smaller in relation to how many urban people are around. And so that really means that however often they interact with people, that's kind of creating this sort of feedback loop of the self-domestication pressures, and their teeth are actually getting smaller. In the other study, they found that their snouts, their noses were getting shorter as well.

We didn't find that, but we did find another characteristic that is consistent across these domesticated animals. And so what does that all mean? As you mentioned, there was another research paper that was done civilian science looking at the snouts of raccoons. What does this all mean if the shape of their skull and their snout are changing as their habitat might change because there's more people in those urban centers? Right. So I would like to remind people that we are thinking and like looking at this as the very, very earliest precursors of a domestication-like effect. And so if we think about dogs, dogs started being desktated probably around somewhere between 30 to 15,000 years ago.

So we're looking at things in urban habitats in these raccoons that might have looked similar to what was happening to these early wolves about 30,000 years ago. So we are so, so early in the process that certainly people are not going to have domesticated, you know, fully pet raccoons anytime soon. Like that is, that's not what's happening here. What is interesting is that it means that we as people, even just existing on the landscape, are having a pretty profound effect on the wildlife around it. us. Whether or not we're feeding them, whether or not we are, you know, harassing them or hunting them, all of that, regardless of all of that, just our presence is working some natural selection pressures on these wildlife that are kind of pushing them towards being better fit to cohabitate with us. That's fascinating. A very similar way to what happened with dogs. So, but remember,

it's very, very, very early on. We are at the very earliest stages that this might be happening. And honestly, the difference between our study and the other study that was recently published just shows we came to the same conclusion about these animals might be self-discating, but we found different evidence for that. And so that really means that we don't fully understand this process yet, and we really just need a lot more research, which is what I'm hoping to do into the future of my career. Aside from maybe thousands of years down the line, somebody having a pet raccoon, is there any upside to evolution like this, not just for the raccoons, but for the ecosystem?

system that they belong in? Oh, absolutely. One of the perspectives we're really taking is trying to understand how some of these, especially generalists, like raccoons, we would call a raccoon and generalist. They can eat anything. They can live anywhere, right? And understanding how they are adapting to our, you know, kind of artificial conditions that we're creating across the world really shows us how some of these species might be really resilient to things like climate change and habitat destruction and things like that. All of these things that are come with, our human activity. It's a little bit inspiring that these animals are really kind of persisting regardless of us. And they're going to make sure that they can survive kind of regardless. And

they're really figuring out how to do that. Regardless of us. I mean, what's the other side of that? Because we are having, to your point, we're having an impact on their ecosystem and perhaps having an impact on them as well. So what are the downsides of this? downsize is you know we see this trend across a lot of urban wildlife that they really just aren't as afraid of people as they should be and you know you can compare this to things like you know a lot of people know that we don't we don't feed bears in national parks right uh that's because bears can be very dangerous when they're expecting to get food from people and when we have these smaller wildlife species like coyote or even raccoons you know they're getting really really used to people and

they're learning that people are related to food and, you know, den sites even, you know, recuns deading and addicts. And they, that's good in the sense of they're going to be able to persist regardless of us, but it also creates some issues between us and them, both human wildlife conflict-wise, where people might be getting attacked, people might be getting their pets attacked. And then that creates a really unfortunate possibility for the transfer of what we call zoonotic diseases. So diseases that wildlife carry. could then be passed to us. So that includes things like rabies, right? The more raccoons you have in urban spaces, the more bold they are, the more likely they might be to approach a person, possibly bite

them, and now you have a rabies concern. There's also things like canine distemper, which people can't necessarily get, but our pets can, right? A lot of dogs are vaccinated for canine distemper. Same thing with internal parasites. So they have a really gnarly parasite called the raccoon roundworm that humans can get, and it's, you don't want to get raccoon roundworm. So there's a lot of concerns with, you know, as these animals become more and more used to us, what job do we have to kind of try and temper that a little bit, but also try and keep our families safe at the same time? Do you think, and again, I ask this from some purely personal perspective because I have raccoons that are trying to break into my house. Are they getting smarter?

My gut instinct would say, no, they're not getting smarter. I think they are, from all of my research, kind of my perspective, is they're really great at what I just say is messing with things. They're really fantastic at just figuring out new ways to get to their goal, which is generally food. So whether that be, you know, figuring out how to get into somebody's house, but they also, they do tend to learn things from their mothers, for example. So a female who is especially used to living in an urban habitat, she's probably pretty tuned in to exactly how to get things, and she will teach her offspring to do those things as well. So the more animals we have in these urban spaces, it's just got a kind of spiral. We're going to get more and more and more animals

who are really good at certain doors and trash cans and things like that. So I'm talking to you from the city of Toronto where it's estimated there are something like 100,000 raccoons in the city alone. And the cliche is it's a raccoon's world. We just sort of live in it. Does that sound about right? Yes, absolutely. They're going to do what they're going to do, like regardless of us, and whatever they can do to make themselves more efficient at that, whether it be getting more used to people or, you know, learning how to get into trash cans, they're going to do it. Christina, thank you very much for this. Yeah, absolutely. Christina Sluka is a PhD graduate in the ecology program at the University of Wyoming. She studies raccoons. You've been listening to the

current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.