So I chatted with ChatGPT about it, and wound up at the end of the conversation with ChatGPT wanting to design a video game controller especially suited for raccoons, so they could play some sort of Tetris-like game, to keep themselves entertained and maybe curb their curiosity-based destructive behavior.
Look, this shit takes a long time.
Cats have been being domesticated for about 10,000 years and most “cats” we think of as “cats” have been deeply influenced by that.
Just like dogs aren’t actually all that closely related to wolves anymore due to domesticated evolutionary divergence, “housecats” are similarly diverged from their more natural counterparts. Humans have deeply influenced the breeding and thus evolution of both dogs and cats
Thus, humans have had significant impact on cat evolution for those 10,000 years.
Raccoons… have not been domesticated for any length of time and there are no raccoons whose physiology has changed over thousands of years to suit their co-evolutionary relationship with humans… because there isn’t a co-evolutionary relationship with humans.
Animals humans have domesticated and/or used for farming are all deeply evolutionary diverged from their original species. Perhaps only chickens seem to retain some of the characteristics of theorized originating species, the red jungle fowl. Hell, it even goes for plants. Natural corn prior to human farming looked a lot more like wheat than the soft corn we eat regularly. We have done a lot of selective breeding with a lot of these species.
Each of these species have a deeply long-term co-evolutionary path that has been impacted by and often dictated by humans.
Raccoons, once again, have not. They have remained fully wild animals with nature alone dictating most of their evolutionary traits. This may begin to change in a few hundred to a few thousand years if humans and raccoons both stay alive and don’t go extinct and humans continue to encroach on racoon natural habitats and raccoons move deeper into cities. However, we won’t see such a change within our lifetimes. The timeframe for adaptation is just too small for significant change to occur.
didn’t the russians get pet foxes after only 20 or 30 generations in an experiment? They tried with beavers but couldn’t get them to mate iirc
found it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
on thinking about it though curious housecats can be annoying a ‘mostly tame’ raccoon would be worse than a drunk toddler
Sorry for the silly question. I feel I see a lot of tiger + zookeeper/handler videos where what I assume is a non-domesticated cat acts fairly domesticated. Is it just that no one bothers to train/raise raccoons, or what’s up?
Zoo animals behave differently than animals in the wild.
Both types are wild animals, however zoo animals get a meal or two per day with minimal effort required, so of course you’ll get a fat lazy tiger who does not particularly care to attack you.
Second point is that the tiger was raised by that zookeeper from birth, so yeah, the tiger trusts them, that does not mean that the tiger will trust you or anyone else like your neighbour’s pet dog does.
You absolutely can adopt a racoon baby and raise it into a racoon who will act like a pet cat towards you but bite all your visitors. Some people specifically get a wild animal pet for that reason.
The raccoons also get bored really easily and need a lot of stimulation and are extremely curious, despite having a short attention span. All of which will result in them being very destructive to your stuff.
I’m a dumbass and googled taming versus domestication immediately after…
It’s the thumbs. If cats could manipulate objects with better dexterity, we would have a lot more problems.
