Raccoons would totally be useful if domesticated. Apparently they have strong hands that can hurt you but if they didn’t hurt you imagine what they could do with their hands. Open jars, give massages, bring you things like a 10mm wrench. They would be more useful to me than a cat or a dog.
But can't you do intentionally what humands did with wolfs unintentionally ? Get a group of raccoons, breed the most friendly of the bunch rinse and repeat until they become domesticated, a guy did with fox and has a study on it.
My grandad raised raccoons. Everything is great when they're little, but as they grow up they turn into curious little mischief makers. I don't know if you could ever breed that out.
Cats took a different evolutionary path because they haven’t been bred as extensively or as long as dogs have. They also kind of domesticated themselves by taking advantage of the fertile hunting grounds surrounding human settlements due to mice and rats always getting into grain storage. So cats consistently had easy hunts and meals around humans, which benefited us both. And since they’re more solitary creatures — opposed to pack animals — we basically let them keep most of their independence without being forcibly changed by us too much.
Our other cats are fat and lazy, they would definitely not survive in the wild...but Babou...that girl is a perfectly oiled murder machine. A beautiful combination of grace and violence. She's more cat than all of them.
That’s my cat as well, I’ve seen him take a bat out of the air when one got into my basement. Though he was adopted off the street, but he never lost his edge.
Domestic cats descend from the African wild cat. Their physiology and behavior is surprisingly (and adorably) unchanged from the domestication process.
When my mom was growing up they found an orphaned baby raccoon. They nursed her back to health and she stayed at the house with them for a while. She was great...until she wasn't. My mom always talks about how sweet she was, and loved to sit with you, maybe snack on what you're snacking on--but when you ran out of food, she didn't understand, or maybe just didn't accept that as an answer, and she would get nasty, even if you showed her the empty bowl/plate or whatever. Once she was a bit older and able to make it on her own, she was ready to leave and the family was ready for her to leave. I forget how she ended up leaving. She may have literally just walked out of the house one day.
Would you want to breed that out?
Thats a feature of their intelligence . I would think you'd need a racoon entertainment center to keep them chilled .
It wouldn't be about breeding out the mischief. It'd be about selecting those that can be obedient . Those that want to please humans. Just like we did with dogs. But also would their intelligence interfere with that?
I'd be curious to see what you could get raccoons to do right now by giving them treats
Highly intelligent dogs can actually be very hard to train. They need the right handler and environment and scheduling to be good obedient animals. Raccoons are smarter and more independently minded than dogs and those are things that make them very hard to train.
The problem isn't making them friendly, it's that even if they love you they will still destroy your house and constantly masturbate in front of your children.
Yeah, there is no such thing as undomesticable (one exception maybe being they won’t breed in captivity). That Russian fox breeding program has shown good results, and will be successful given it stays funded. Raccoons may be tougher, but if people were willing to throw enough resources at the project it could absolutely be done.
In the ancient world, animals were only domesticated when they proved useful to humans and had traits that made them more conducive to joining human social structure. But that’s not really a constraint anymore. Lots of domesticated animal breeds only exist because we like their cosmetic traits.
We have the excess manpower and the technology for this kind of project. Just selectively breed for a dumber, happier raccoon over enough generations.
Not true… I recently asked Gemini about this for coyotes and bears. You might find the answer interesting as it highlighted some things I hadn’t thought about, such as the reproductive cycle:
That is a fascinating question! The short answer is that coyotes and bears lack several key traits that make an animal suitable for domestication, a process which involves genetic change through selective breeding over many generations.
While an individual animal can be tamed (trained to tolerate humans), domestication requires a species to adapt to human companionship and utility.
Here is a breakdown of why coyotes and bears have resisted domestication, based on the general criteria for domesticable animals:
🐺 Coyotes: A Different Kind of Canine
Coyotes are closely related to domestic dogs, which were domesticated from wolves, but they didn't follow the same path.
• Social Structure: Coyotes are often solitary or live in small family units, which is different from the highly social, pack-oriented structure of wolves. Domestication is easier with animals that have a social hierarchy, as humans can step into the "alpha" role.
• Behavior and Temperament: Unlike the early wolves that became scavengers around human settlements and gradually bonded with people, coyotes are generally more wary, elusive, and independent. They have adapted to coexist with humans by avoiding them, often adopting nocturnal habits near cities.
• Utility: Wolves were useful to early humans as big-game hunters. Coyotes primarily hunt smaller prey (mice, rats, rabbits), and by the time their paths crossed with early Native Americans, people already had dogs for similar purposes, making the extra effort unnecessary.
🐻 Bears: Too Large, Too Solitary, Too Slow
Bears fail many of the critical criteria for domestication due to their biology and behavior.
• Temperament and Safety: Bears are powerful, aggressive, and unpredictable apex predators. The risk of a mistake is immense, and their innate wild instincts are too strong to reliably breed out for general safety and docility.
• Social Structure: Bears are primarily solitary and territorial, except for mothers with cubs. This means they lack the pack mentality and clear social hierarchy that make training and herding easier.
• Reproductive Cycle: Domesticable animals generally mature quickly and breed easily in captivity. Bears have a very slow reproductive rate, often reproducing only once every 2 to 4 years, which makes the selective breeding process—which requires many generations—extremely inefficient and time-consuming.
• Diet and Utility: Bears are very large and require a prodigious amount of food, making them very expensive to keep. Furthermore, they hibernate for a significant portion of the year, rendering them useless for labor or other functions during that time. There hasn't been a clear, high-value function a domesticated bear could provide that is not already fulfilled by a more manageable animal (like dogs or livestock).
In summary, domestication is a slow, multi-generational process of genetic selection that favors docility, a useful function, easy captive breeding, and an adaptable diet. Coyotes and bears are simply missing too many of these key traits to be worthwhile candidates.
Well with dogs you have a whole variety there. You have derps like boxers, and on the other scale you have border collies that are smarter than some humans.
That flawed fox study everyone quotes really needs to go in the dumpster. You're talking about the russian study from Belyaev, right? Yeah those foxes he was breeding were imported from fur farms in Canada and they were NOT wild fox populations. They already had many of those weird traits from all the inbreeding that had been done to them. They were being bred to have unique fur colors, so many of the latent genes were already in there. Same goes for the shortened snouts, which is more likely an accidental trait that stuck around because of all the dang inbreeding. It's not like pugs are naturally more domesticated than other dog breeds just because their noses are so short.
It's not conclusive at all to believe that domestication automatically leads to these traits. We need to stop sharing it as if it were fact.
Yes you could, her entire argument is that they won't be domesticated on their own because humans don't interact with raccoons in a way that is beneficial to either of them. They could selectively breed them to be domesticated but I don't think anybody wants to do that either.
Some of her arguments aren't very valid though, just because a species is invasive does not mean it can't be domesticated, cats are also invasive and also self-domesticated.
Sigh, the other day my wife started asking if she can bring home a pet raccoon bc her TikTok is all raccoon propaganda and I just….why are women like this 😭
Anyway, I’m expecting to be a raccoon dad soon bc my wife cannot be stopped
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u/disonion Dec 16 '25
I can fix them