Step aside cats and dogs, because raccoons are moving in as Man’s next best friend, according to a recently published study. The bandit-eyed nocturnals, known for overturning trashcans and squatting in attics, are showing early signs of domestication and getting cuter.
Or, at least, the snouts of urban racoons are getting shorter, which is a common visual marker associated with domesticated animals, explains Raffaela Lesch, the University of Arkansas biology professor behind the study.
“There are certain traits in domesticated animals, referred to as domestication syndrome, that occur quite a lot,” she says. “We see reduced snouts, smaller brains, white patches, curly tails, floppy ears. Not all of these traits occur in all our domesticated animals, but they are somewhat ubiquitous.”
Lesch’s hypothesis stemmed from an encounter she had with a raccoon a few years back. After accidentally tossing a pop can onto the head of a raccoon that had been scavenging in a garbage bin, she realized that urban environments are filled with racoons, whether we can see them or not. The incident got her thinking about how the creatures are already coexisting with humans, and what that could mean for their evolutionary future.
“It really inspired me—thinking about how the human environment that we have created, how cities might be a similar environment to what cats and dogs might have found themselves in when they were domesticated,” says Lesch. “I was starting to think, maybe cities have the potential to kick start domestication events, and raccoons would be the perfect species to test that.”
To get to the bottom of this, Lesch and her team of undergraduates downloaded thousands of photos from the crowd-sourced biodiversity data platform iNaturalist and compared the snout lengths of urban raccoons and rural raccoons. Her findings concluded that today’s urban raccoons have snouts that are shorter by 3.5 per cent.
The dominant theory behind this change is that the more tame the raccoon, the more likely they are to avoid conflict with humans and live to pass on their tame demeanour to their offspring. On a biological level, Lesch explains that this tame-favouring selection process leads to embryonic development that births animals with those domestication syndrome traits, including shorter snouts.
While it is unknown just how long this process has been underway, Lesch guesses that it likely began with the rise of cities across North America. But looking ahead, though the mischievous critters may be on their way to pet-hood, she projects it will be a long time before they fully assimilate the way dogs and cats have.
“We’re talking about thousands of years,” Lesch says. “We’re not going to be around if they actually are domesticating themselves. Our great-great-great-great- grandchildren might be, but ultimately, it’s still at a really early stage.”
Despite their increasingly adorable exterior, Lesch also reminds us that raccoons are still wild animals, and that even if they one day became domesticated, they might not make the best pets.
“They can open anything,” she says. “So if they ever get to full domesticated status, I envision them to be challenging as a pet. But as of right now, they’re still completely wild animals.”
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