Could raccoons become the new dogs?
Popular Science...
Last fall, a study of raccoons found that these city-dwelling trash pandas are beginning to look different than their rural cousins in the U.S.—they appear to be domesticating themselves.
It wouldn’t be the first time a wild animal species manipulated humanity for its own benefit. Dogs did it at least 14,000 years ago, discovering that befriending garbage-producing humans resulted in tastier, more abundant scraps and less arduous lives on their own. New genetic data indicates that cats feeding off the abundant rodents plundering human food stores domesticated themselves for similar reasons around 10,000 years ago.
Dogs and cats hanging around worked out pretty well for humans, too. The first dogs served as early-warning systems, protectors, and hunting buddies. Cats, on the other hand, helped keep food fresher and reduced the spread of disease. Over time, through a combination of natural selection and human intervention, they evolved into the cute and cuddly companion animals of today.
Could urban raccoons be headed down the same evolutionary path straight into the American home?
Raccoons as pets
With their expressive masked faces and dexterous little fingers, pet raccoons are already found en masse on social media: sleeping in open dresser drawers and picking Fruit Loops out of cereal bowls. But the algorithm only shows one side of what Lauren Stanton, postdoctoral fellow at the Schell Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, describes as “very active and intelligent animals with complex needs.”
Problem number one? Raccoons are nocturnal. They sleep in tight spaces during the day and venture out at dusk to forage, hunt, explore, and socialize across vast territories that can stretch as many as three square miles. And they don’t do it quietly. Raccoons have all sorts of vocalizations: purrs, chirps, hisses, and straight-up screams. A hollering, busybody raccoon does not a good night’s sleep make.
And then there are those paws which, despite a lack of opposable thumbs, are remarkably agile. A pet raccoon would be able to untie knots, unlatch locks, unscrew jars of food, and open doors in the middle of the night to let their wild compatriots in for raucous, sexy parties during mating season.
As highly-opportunistic omnivores, raccoons hunt insects, aquatic animals, small mammals, and birds. They also scavenge just about anything they can find. Not only would the food in fridges and cabinets fall victim to their nightly raids, they could never be trusted around a gerbil or bird cage—and god forbid there’s a fish tank around.
Nor would they discriminate about the water chosen for dipping their food, a common behavior which increases paw sensitivity while eating. Toilet bowl, sink full of dirty dishes, or that poor, beleaguered fish tank—it’s all the same to them.
Altogether, this web of destructive, innate behaviors is one that not even ongoing domestication would be likely to ever make compatible with the human home—not that people are likely to stop trying.
“I have talked to many people over the years who have attempted to own raccoons, and their story often ends the same: The raccoon got too difficult to manage and so they ‘released it back to the wild,’” says Stanton, a deadly problem for human-raised raccoons that never learned essential survival skills.
Domestication vs. Domesticated
The evolutionary path of virtually every domesticated animal has undergone “domestication syndrome”—a pattern of physical changes seen across diverse species that includes the development of floppier ears, flatter and rounder faces, and curlier tails over time.
A 2025 study of the snout-to-skull-length ratio of close to 20,000 images of American raccoons posted on the citizen science platform iNaturalist found the snouts of urban raccoons were 3.56 percent shorter than those of rural raccoons—possibly an early symptom of domestication syndrome.
But Stanton isn’t completely convinced that’s actually what’s happening in these urban populations.
“Although morphological changes might have a genetic basis, there are multiple reasons why such changes could occur,” she explains. “Changes in skull shape, for example, could be due to changes in an animal’s diet, since many urban species shift towards eating softer, carbohydrate-rich foods found in our garbage.”
Changes in urban raccoon behavior can’t automatically be chalked up to domestication either.
“If raccoons become habituated to people or learn to associate them with food, they might behave in a more docile or tame manner around people, but this does not mean that they are domesticated,” Stanton continues. Additional empirical evidence, including examination of the raccoon genome, is needed to know for sure.
Regardless, Stanton is adamant that there is no hypothetical future in which raccoons could realistically become good house pets.
“In my opinion, what makes raccoons so charismatic is their curiosity and unruly nature,” she says.
“If we attempt to strip away their wildness through ownership or attempts at domestication, then we may lose some of the qualities that make them so special in the first place.”
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