New study suggests urban raccoons are becoming more domesticated. Could they be pets one day?

When most people think of raccoons, they picture city dwellers. The mid-sized, furry animals with distinctive, mask-like markings and ringed tails are infamous for slipping out after dusk to rummage through garbage bins. 

But by nature raccoons aren’t urban creatures. They hail from forests and woodlands, where their omnivorous diets includes corn, nuts, and berries, as well as insects, clams and fish. 

They’re also native to the Americas, and are found in every Canadian province except Newfoundland and Labrador, though sightings have been reported there, too.

“They are kind of like little enigmas,” said Christina Sluka, an ecology PhD graduate student at the University of Wyoming.

“We don’t really know a whole lot about how they’re adapting to urban habitats,” Sluka told The Current’s host Matt Galloway.  

In a recent study from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, researchers found that raccoons aren’t just changing their diets to capitalize on human leftovers — life in the city may be slowly domesticating them. And the evidence could be right there on their not-so-innocent faces.

What does it mean for raccoons to be domesticated?

Domestication is a long-term process during which a wild animal is gradually adapted to live in close association with humans for food, labour, or companionship.

Our common pets, like dogs, are very different from their wild ancestors, said Sluka.

Dogs, she says, began the process of domestication “somewhere between 30,000 to 15,000 years ago.” 

Thus, the domestication of raccoons is at the “very, very earliest” stage, says Sluka, who was not involved in the study.

In the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Zoology, lead author Raffaela Lesch and her team analyzed nearly 20,000 photos of raccoons from across the U.S., all submitted to a community science platform.

The researchers found that raccoons living in densely populated urban areas show physical changes — most notably, shorter snouts. The study documented a “3.56 per cent snout reduction between rural to urban raccoons.”

Biologists have discovered that many animals follow a similar evolutionary pattern, where they developed traits such as a shorter muzzle, reduced ear cartilage, loss of coat pigmentation and a dampened fear response — all of which increased their chances of surviving near humans.

Sluka’s work is similar to Lesch’s. She looks at museum specimens of raccoons collected as far back as the 1880s, to study how their skull shapes have changed alongside expanding cities. 

She found that “some of their teeth are actually getting smaller in relation to how many urban people are around.”

Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde, a professor in biology and evolutionary ecology at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., who also was not involved in the study, said these changes align with an idea known as domestication syndrome — a “collection of traits that change when [animals] live around humans.” 

Physically, he says, urban raccoons display something called neoteny, which means they keep juvenile features into adulthood, while behaviourally, they grow more tolerant of humans.

These findings, says Sluka, are notable because domestication is usually thought to start with humans capturing and selectively breeding animals. In the case of urban raccoons, however, the process appears to have begun much earlier, and simply by living in close proximity to people.

“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 us,” Sluka said.

“Just our presence is working some natural selection pressures on these wildlife that are kind of pushing them towards being [a] better fit to cohabitate with us.”

What will future raccoons be like?

When Sarah Thyme and her husband found a baby raccoon beside its mother, who had been killed by a car, they decided to bring the orphan home. 

That raccoon, named Cheeto, is now one of three raccoons the American couple keep as pets.

In Canada, owning wild native or exotic animals is generally prohibited under provincial or regional laws, unless the owner has obtained a special permit.

“Sadly, all of our raccoons were orphaned for one reason or another and we brought them in so they had a chance at living a beautiful life,” said Thyme, who lives in South Carolina, where no special permits were required. 

Although Thyme shares plenty of charming photos and videos of their raccoons online, she said that they aren’t encouraging others to adopt them.

“For most people, a raccoon would be a poor choice because they’re such high maintenance animals,” said Thyme. 

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Schulte-Hostedde also warns against bringing wild raccoons into the home because they can carry a variety of pathogens and parasites — raccoon roundworm, canine distemper, and rabies among them — that pose serious health risks. 

“I would never ever go near a raccoon for that reason,” he said.   

Sluka agrees, and says it may be a long time before we can call these critters our pets.

“We are so, so early in the process that certainly people are not going to have domesticated fully pet raccoons anytime soon,” she said.

Still, both of the scientists say they are intrigued by what they’re seeing.

Schulte-Hostedde says urban raccoons may be at the “incipient stages of some kind of evolutionary change that’s consistent with domestication.”

“If you fast forward a thousand years, and if cities are still around, you may find that city raccoons will look very different,” he said.