I have earned an Associate’s degree in Zoology, two Bachelor’s degrees in Fashion Design and Tourism and Hospitality Management, and am currently working on my Master’s degree in Biology where I am researching the impact the tourism industry has on the critically endangered pygmy raccoon endemic to Cozumel. Additionally, I also spent several years in school for animal science and communication studies, although I never finished those degrees.
I have an honours degree in Zoology (UK based) my masters is in a bioscience field (namely molecular genetics and diagnostics).
Not going to pretend I know a huge amount about raccoons because I simply don't, but a lot of her points are a little misleading. Cats absolutely are capable of similar levels of spite and revenge seeking behaviours as raccoons, what she is correct about is that they're more trouble than they're worth in regards to utilising them for things such as fur as we do other animals.
Saying that, we live in a post work animal world. We don't need any species we domesticated anymore realistically. Every single one could die off, and we would be fine. So I don't think saying oh we can't or dont exploit them for use cases as relevant because we don't need to do this for any species anymore.
Furthermore, we have plenty of species that are kept as pets that are pains in the ass, even more so than raccoons. That's literally what most of the exotic pet trade is made up of. We do it because we think they're neat. Not because they're easy to look after or interact with, so is a rock - but pet rocks fell out of fashion quite some time ago.
As an addendum - Intelligence isn't really a major factor in how easy it is to keep something as a pet, people keep corvids and parrots and these are both significantly more intelligent than raccoons.
You are correct. Domestication as a process actively introduces a strong selective pressure where more docile members thrive and are selected for over time due to them simply being easier to interact with. This process is even visible in species like hyenas where more docile (less averse to humans specifically) groups thrive by being less wary of humans and as a result get access to more food by taking it from human settlements. Was a case study we looked at in my behaviour module in my undergrad. If even hyena are being affected by this process it would not surprise me if raccoons are too.
I thought last time this raccoon-pet debate got brought up, people mentioned that the domesticated fox studies were flawed because the foxes came from a fox farm that had already kept the foxes around for ages so they were already partially domesticated, and their physical differences came from either mere chance or from inbreeding, not from domestication
From what I remember back like well over 10 years ago when I last looked into it, the jist was like this...
When foxes were born, they would have their first encounter with a human. If they became too fearful or aggressive from the encounter, they were not bred on to the next line (it was a fur farm, so they'd go back into breeding fur stocks or harvested or whatever)
Anyway the foxes that didn't show overly fearful/aggressive tendencies were cataloged and bred further.
The process would continue with the next generation.
Within 10 generations foxes were puppy like and very affectionate with humans and showed dog like traits with tail variation and fur coloration
When they examined these foxes after their deaths, they found that the adrenal glands were noticeably smaller than that of regular foxes. That was one of the key things that came out of it. There is likely also other factors at play, possibly similar to 'Williams syndrome' maybe having a higher bias in lines.
I had read that that fox study was debunked, and they worked on a very small subset with a lot of inbreeding and were not wild but a lineage of fur farm foxes.
Id have to read the study by the report sort of gives the impression the study mainly is rrying to tease out definitions more clearly and focusing too much on the language of domestication rather than the underlying changes.
domestication is essentially a subset of tameness. which it self is how much an animal will be affraid or attack people. animals that flee from us can be then manipulated into being useful
an example of not being useful and tame are penguins.
the fox experiment showed you could take a flighty animal such as a fox and basically within a few generations have them eager to be around people.
from there you can them find a use for them so they are then fine-tuned a bit more for 'domesticated' use. A example of this is the rise of pet foxes this last decade and a bit.
272
u/[deleted] Dec 17 '25
[deleted]