A new study suggests that raccoons living in cities and suburbs are undergoing very early, subtle changes in both body shape and behavior that match those seen in the first stages of domestication in other species, mainly driven by easy access to human food and reduced fear of people.
Researchers stress that “trash pandas” are not yet domesticated pets, but urban populations are showing traits that suggest the domestication process may be beginning. And, apparently, trash may be at the root of this development.
The study lays out the case that the domestication process is often wrongly thought of as initiated by humans—with people capturing and selectively breeding wild animals. But the study authors claim that the process begins much earlier, when animals become habituated to human environments.“One thing about us humans is that, wherever we go, we produce a lot of trash,” says the study’s co-author and University of Arkansas at Little Rock biologist Raffaela Lesch. Piles of human scraps offer a bottomless buffet to wildlife, and to access that bounty, animals need to be bold enough to rummage through human rubbish but not so bold as to become a threat to people. “If you have an animal that lives close to humans, you have to be well-behaved enough,” Lesch says. “That selection pressure is quite intense.”Proto-dogs, for example, would have dug through human trash heaps, and cats were attracted to the mice that gathered around refuse. Over time, individual animals that had a reduced fight-or-flight response could feed more successfully around humans and pass their nonreactive behavior on to their offspring.
The researchers reported observing a notable level of snout shortening among urban raccoons. This finding fits into a broader pattern called “domestication syndrome,” a cluster of traits such as shorter faces, smaller brains or teeth, floppy ears, white patches, and calmer behavior that tends to appear when animals adapt to life around humans.
The leading hypothesis is that selection for tameness alters early embryonic development of neural crest cells, which indirectly produces these visible and behavioral changes across multiple body systems, including the size of the nose.
She [Raffaela Lesch, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock] and 11 undergraduate and five graduate students from her fall 2024 biometry class combed through more than 19,000 photos of raccoons on iNaturalist, an online database of wildlife observations submitted by hobbyists and citizen scientists around the country. They found 249 images that showed the animals in perfect profile.Then, the researchers used a computer imaging program to measure the length of the specimens’ snouts, from the tip of the nose to the tear duct, and total head length, from the tip of the nose to where the ear attaches to the head. When Lesch and her students mapped the counties where each picture was taken, a clear pattern emerged: Urban raccoons’ snouts were 3.6% shorter than those of raccoons in rural areas.“That doesn’t sound like a lot, and in a sense, it is not a lot, but if you think about these animals potentially only being at the very early beginning stages of domestication, that is still a fairly clear signal,” Lesch said. She was lead author of a study published October 2 in the journal Frontiers in Zoology.
Apparently, trash isn’t the only thing raccoons find appealing in the urban environment, either!
A small, furry “suspect” reportedly broke into a Hanover ABC store and ransacked several shelves over the weekend, after which he was found passed out on the bathroom floor.According to a social media post by Hanover County Animal Protection and Shelter, on the morning of Saturday, Nov. 29, Officer Martin responded to an “unusual call” at the ABC store in the town of Ashland.When the officer arrived, she found that a raccoon had broken into the store, ransacked several shelves, become intoxicated, and then passed out in the bathroom.
File this story under “Wild America”.
Image by perplexity.ai
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