Raccoons

Let me start off my saying that raccoons are never really pets. Like baby deer, they are wild animals that may decide to live with your for a while. They all grow up, they all get wild, and they all head off to make their own way in the world. With that disclaimer, it's story time.
My parents are veterinarians. One of the odd things about being a vet (and there are a lot of odd things about being a vet) is that any time someone finds a sick/hurt/abandoned animal of any sort, they bring it to the vet. You might think that doesn't sound odd, after all that's what vets do, they fix animals. The odd thing is that people bring these animals there to leave them. If you find a pile of kittens without a mother, bring them to the vet. A flock of ducklings? Bring them to the vet. Baby raccoons? To the vet! People confuse 'veterinarian' with 'home for wayward animals'. Of course most vets are suckers for raising baby things which is why they got into this job in the first place, so as a kid we ended up raising a lot kittens and ducklings and even raccoons. Because of this, I had a fun childhood and I have a lot of stories.
This raccoon story isn't about a raccoon that somebody brought to my parents, though I have a lot of those too, it's about one that I got myself. When I was eighteen I worked for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources for the summer. One day a car showed up at the office with a raccoon. On the roof. The lady was freaked out. It seems that she had parked in the woods to go hiking and when she got back this little guy was waiting for her and wouldn't leave her alone. She didn't want to touch it and it didn't want to leave so she did the most logical thing in her situation. She slowly drove to the DNR to ask them what to do with it. We were part of the Wildlife Division after all.
Nobody there had any idea what to do. except me, of course. By that time I was an old pro at raccoons. we had raised several that had been brought into my parents. This was a young raccoon, a bit over two months old probably, that had clearly been hand raised by a person. When it got to be too much to handle they dropped in in the woods figuring that everything would sort itself out which it sort of did. Being heavily imprinted on people the abandoned raccoon went looking for more people to take care of it. He found a car and just waited for the nice person to show up, which she did. When I got him, he was pretty happy to have found a person would hold and feed him. Probably the DNR should have done something more official with him, but I assured them that I'd taken care of raccoons before and I could do it again. At the end of the day he came home with me.
This story is getting long. So I don't completely fill my front page with a wall of text, I'm putting a jump in here. Click through to read about living with a raccoon.



The really nice people at the DNR offered to loan me a cage to drive the raccoon home in. I convinced them that I'd be just fine and he could just ride next to me for the 35 minute drive home. That was not a great decision. Raccoons explore all the time, even in a moving car. He checked out the steering wheel and the brake pedal and my head and the radio and all of the controls and the steering wheel again and on and on all the way home while I tried not to crash. We even went through a drive through restaurant to get some dinner and the poor kid who handed us the food certainly ended up with a story to tell his friends as the raccoon actually reached out for the food when it was being handed to me. It was funny.
Raccoons are fantastically social creatures, especially when they're young. They absolutely hate being alone, ever. This is why I always suggest that if anyone ever tries to keep a raccoon, they try to keep at least two. You don't want to spend as much time with a raccoon as it wants to spend with you. When he got home he was named Hambone and he moved right in. Initially he stayed in a cage at night because you cannot leave a raccoon alone in the house at night. It didn't take too many nights before we decided that he was big enough to stay outside at night and at least he'd have something to do other than call for use to let him out all night. During the day he would stay inside as much as anyone would let him. I still had to work, but I had a pile of younger siblings that were still home during the long summer days and Hambone pursued their affections relentlessly. He would play with everyone, all the time. He'd pretend to attack your feet, and your hands, and your head. He'd climb up on the back of the couch and play with your hair, and more disturbingly, your ears. He'd finally get tired and fall asleep resting on your lap or your shoulder and that was cute enough that you'd forget that he has just spent half an hour trying to reach your brain through your ear with this tiny little hands. Sometimes he'd play attack you outright, but sometimes he'd sneak attack you. It's quite alarming when a small pair of hands and teeth attack your feet from under the couch when you don't know it's coming. More amusingly, it was really funny when he would slowly crawl up the back of the couch and pounce on the heads of my sisters friends. Nothing more giggle inducing then watching a 16 year old girl launch off the couch with a raccoon on her head. Good times were had by all.
Meal times were tough. Hambone ate mostly cat food. He'd eat anything, but the food he was supposed to eat was cat food and he had plenty. When we sat down to eat though, he thought he was invited to sit on the table and sample everything he could reach. This always got him pitched outside but he never stopped. Once outside he'd scream to be let in and eat. We ate fast. He eventually figured out how to open the screen door on the sliding glass door. He would then climb between the screen and the glass to about head height and continue yelling for us to let him in just feet away from the table. We ate really fast.
He was into everything. Everything. There was nothing that wasn't interesting to him. As he got bigger we had to keep him outside more because he'd knock things down just because. Cats sometimes do this too, but he did it to everything, all the time. He even figured out how to pop screens out of windows to let himself inside at night. One morning I was woken up by my mother screaming at me. Hambone had gotten in and decided to explore an upper cabinet in the kitchen. When we got up he was sitting quite happily way up high where two shelves of canned goods and spices previously were. He had pushed every single object off the shelves onto the floor and was quite happy with himself.
The summer wore on and Hambone got big. Really big, He would sit over the cat food bowl and growl at the cats until he'd had his fill and waddle away. With proper nutrition raccoons get huge. Like all raccoons he spent more and more time by himself exploring the world farther and farther away. By the time I was ready to go to college he was pretty independent though he still came around every day to say hello and eat. He and my little brother had become good friends and played outside quite a bit. Hambone would ride around on his head like a giant live coon skin cap. It was simultaneously really awesome and really bizarre. I continued to get news about Hambone through the fall at school. Eventually I got the call that he'd been found on the road having met the fate of many a raccoon. I felt pretty bad, though not as bad as my little brother. Hambone was a really neat animal to live with. He was very friendly, almost too friendly, and he interacted with people in a way that was different than any domestic pet you'd normally keep. He was curious and inquisitive and explored the world in a way that I didn't get to experience again until I had children. I would never recommend that anyone ever try to keep a raccoon as a pet even if it is legal where they live. If you somehow do though, you'll come away from it with an appreciation for these amazing animals, and a lot of stories.