Stadtwaschbären entwickeln sich zu Haustieren
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raccoons-are-showing-early-signs-of-domestication/
Stadtwaschbären entwickeln sich zu Haustieren
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raccoons-are-showing-early-signs-of-domestication/
24 Kommentare
Let them in – if you’re cold they’re cold.
A few hundred more years and I can play fetch with a raccoon? Alright, sign me up for that experimental gene manipulation.
If they could evolve to not tear up my house we can work something out.
Someone tell me how to insert a GIF of Rocket doing something racoony.
The cute ones don’t get chased off as much and the nice ones might even get cat food.
Humans are probably more likely to kill raccoons that look wild/less like pets.
Makes sense. Cuter animals get fewer rocks thrown at them, too.
Maybe raccoons just find a shorter snout sexier?
They have hands and can get into way more things than a cat.
Taking the cat route? Understandable.
In another 10,000 years, the only animals left will be the cute ones we adopt and the extremophiles we don’t have to protect from the coming climate shift.
Now show how persistent toxoplasmosis causes the same changes and we’ll have unraveled the whole mystery.
Weren’t they actually kept as pets in some areas of the country though? Like, I could have sworn a president in the 1800s was gifted a raccoon to keep as a pet
They really know how to pick the cutest raccoon for that article picture.
They carry some nasty diseases. One parasites eggs can’t even be killed by bleach.
Apparently Fido goes out in the evening for more than just poopies.
Reminds me of the Silver Fox Domestication experiment, if you’re curious to learn more about domestication syndrome.
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x
we need to just fully domesticate these guys. People keep them as pets all the time but they’re not quite dialed in yet.
They’re still crafty little buggers who will make a mess if you don’t watch them.
Yeah because they’re just little babies
I feel like people are just feeding them more. As far as pet aspects, I find them kind of a cross between the cat and dog. They have opposable thumbs. They love to wash their food down with water. They used to invade my outdoor cat’s food bowl, dunking the food into the water and then eating it. I would not be opposed to domesticating raccoons. I think it’d be interesting.
inaturalist is so cool. I love community science. My professor back in undergrad had us use it for a plant identification course, but I love hearing how the data can be used for so many cool studies like this.
You mean the raccoons that don’t look more like pets are dying off?
Born too late to be able to afford housing, too early to have a pet raccoon