Raccoons Are Domesticating Themselves, Could Be Pets of the Future
Raccoons might be following cats and dogs down the path to domestication.
Dogs showed up between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, attracted by the smell of cookfires and food scraps. When we started doing agriculture and started storing lots of grain, that attracted rodents, which in turn attracted cats.
Getting into close proximity with humans for an extended period is a tried-and-true path toward domestication. Once animals get close to humans they have to adapt to survive, meeting a middle ground where they’re bold enough to take advantage of our resources but friendly enough that we like (or at least tolerate) having them around.
Raffaela Lesch, a zoologist and professor of biology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, along with her students, recently published a study in the journal Frontiers in Zoology, suggesting raccoons may be starting down the path toward domestication.
Raccoons may already have started domesticating themselves
The research was based on something called the Neural Crest Domestication Syndrome (NCDS) hypothesis, which describes traits common to domesticated animals: smaller brains, floppy ears, shorter snouts, curled tails, and white patches or coloration across the body.
These traits are common across domesticated animals, though a specific animal or species may not exhibit every single trait. These physical traits appear to be related to tameness or friendliness with humans. Over generations, this selection pressure for tameness also changes the spread of neural crest cells in the body, which are important for different organ systems including the skeleton. Put simply, as an animal’s behavior changes, so does its body.
North American raccoons (Procyon lotor) are distributed across the United States in both rural and urban environments. In cities, they have access to a ready supply of food scraps and an absence of other large predators, making cities a useful niche for bold raccoons.
Lesch and her students looked at approximately 20,000 crowdsourced photos of raccoons on iNaturalist, looking for signs of physical changes related to domestication. They found that some urban raccoons are exhibiting shorter snouts after generations of living in a city environment.
“I wanted to know if living in a city environment would kickstart domestication processes in animals that are currently not domesticated,” Lesch said, in an Oct. 16 statement. “Would raccoons be on the pathway to domestication just by hanging out in close proximity to humans?”
Of course, there is some noise in the data. Friendlier raccoons are more likely to be photographed, and therefore more likely to show up in crowdsourced data. These sorts of biases in the data are nearly impossible to avoid when dealing with wild animals. Still, it appears that at least some populations of raccoons are following dogs and cats down the path to domestication.
“Trash is really the kickstarter,” Lesch said. “Wherever humans go, there is trash. Animals love our trash. It’s an easy source of food. All they have to do is endure our presence, not be aggressive, and then they can feast on anything we throw away. It would be fitting and funny if our next domesticated species was raccoons. I feel like it would be funny if we called the domesticated version of the raccoon the trash panda.”
If things keep going the way they are, your great-great-many-greats grandkids might get to have raccoons as pets.
Find the ultimate animal companions in The Golden Compass, streaming now on SYFY.
