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Cute or Evil: A Quest for Raccoon Truth

It was that reply that had the previously peaceful clerk looking like he was close to creating a clean-up-on-register-two situation.

Both reactions are at least a little bit understandable. People like the clerk know the pudgy bandits have attacked and injured pets and even humans, seemingly unprovoked, in incidents that range from a gang-like jumping just up Highway 101 last winter to a Carmel ass-chomping event that still haunts a homemaker three years later (events that can peak right around now, when baby raccoons are learning to leave the den with protective mothers). Or that they plunder trash cans and tear through roofs, drywall and vents to make attics, joists and crawl spaces their own cozy disaster areas, complete with latrines rank enough to curl nose hairs. Their feces precipitated the local community’s saddest wildlife-related tragedy in a generation when a toddler named Casey Read was blinded and brain damaged after ingesting roundworm-infected raccoon scat in 1998.

Despite this disturbing stuff, their lofty mix of intelligence, resourcefulness and dexterity leaves wildlife biologists, academics and exterminators simply awestruck. Their unique charisma and untempered curiosity, meanwhile, endear them to far more admirers than many might imagine, or wildlife experts recommend.

In other words, raccoon lovers live among us. Within the Weekly offices alone lurk an editor who concedes she once made a habit of prepping peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for a raccoon she named Phil, and an account executive who bottle-fed a little kit “before he advanced to Gerber baby cereal.” She called hers Godzilla, and still reflects fondly on trips to the lake to catch crawdads and pluck blackberries – and motorcycle rides with Godzilla holding onto the handlebars – that lasted until he figured out how to unlatch his cage, open the neighbor’s screen door and decimate the contents of their kitchen cabinets. (He was moved to a national park.