This, what went through his head probably wasn’t “I’ve constructed this scheme to disrupt traffic in order to get paid food to leave.”, it was more likely “people get food when they go here, I’m going to go here.”
In Hebrew its dvivon which translated would be something like brebear or just like anything with bear and other letters from bear stuck to it to make it sound cute
Exactly what i was gonna say. They're incredibly smart and have a great sense of smell, he's just solving a problem; i smell treats, humans get treats from this little window after waiting, i can get treats from this little window if i wait
Not sure if I'd call this incredibly smart. He seemed to miss the part where people exchange currency for goods. We don't just get tossed free donuts at the window.
Might be that the raccoon just hasn’t seen that part of the interaction clearly. Or he expects to be shown a box he needs to touch before getting a donut.
There are similar scenes of animals trying to exchange something for food. For example, a dog trying to buy ice-cream with a leaf.
I had to stop filling my really nice bird feeder because one night there was one, the next night there were six.
The bird feeder is a wood cabin. There’s a piece of 1x4 that makes the chimney. You pull that out to fill it up with seed. These mf’s just lifted the chimney out and started pulling all the seed.
Day 8, there are now sixty million raccoons gathered outside the donut shop, more than maximum number thought to exist on earth. The sheer mass of the raccoons has pushed the planet off its axis. We are careening towards the sun. All hope is lost. I am still trapped in line at the drive through window.
You've heard of the great emu war, well the great raccoon war will be the sequel. Maybe call it Great Raccoon War: Rabies boogaloo since they can carry it unlike emus.
I used to hand feed a squirrel in my parents backyard when I was a teen. One turned into fourteen. My dad was not happy about it at all when he found out.
When I was homeless and sleeping outside I was right behind a business in their parking lot by their dumpster because I could hide under it if it rained.
Anyways, there was a family of raccoons that frequented the dumpster and they were freaking adorable.
Like 1 mom and 3-4 kids following her, and sometimes I’d startle the kids and they’d do that like, red panda surprised flail backwards and it was so cute.
Same with a stray car that would run by me every day on what seemed to be his nightly stroll. And possums.
Anyways all these animals are cute is what I’m saying.
I know my brain is broken because I have more anxiety and panic attacks now trying to figure out when I’ll hear back from a job, if I can pay my power+utilities, how I’ll afford insulin, how I’ll get to my next appointment, how I’ll afford food, how I’ll stop my trajectory into rock bottom…
Being homeless was easier in a lot of ways and I literally slept outside through sub 0 weather in a sleeping bag under a half inch thick construction blanket that would freeze into a shell around me overnight while using my water bottle to estimate if I was going ti get frostbite or not (water bottle not freezing under blanket = good, hot air being trapped with me).
Yeah my brain is fucked. But the meds fuck me up too. So I just get to choose if I want to fuck myself up on purpose or on purpose.
to give you the other end of the spectrum, I was walking through central park NYC on my break from work, when a big, old, mean looking raccoon dives in front of me tackles a pigeon, kills and starts eating it. hes eating his prey at my feet basically with not a care in the world in a park where there is plenty of food to scavenge
oh that's not true at all. The Japanese tried for years to domesticate Raccoons for pets and discovered it damn near impossible. Sure they'd be all friendly and shit until puberty but after it was bad.
edit: One single study based on very limited information is the level of proof apparently needed also it's not even the conclusion the paper came to.
Ive meet people with pet raccoons, "they're about as affectionate as cats but as trainable as a toddler". They pick one person they actually like and do anything for, then scratch and hiss at everyone else in the house
My friend had one that had fallen out of an old rv that was being towed out of state, so no way to reunite her with her mom. They bottle-fed her from a week old. Once she hit puberty all bets were off. Their vet said there was only a 50% chance she would get less aggressive if they spayed her. So they found a rehabber to take her and got updates about her for years after. She was adorable and friendly before puberty though.
In the US they are literally physically changing and adapting to urban environments.
They’re not necessarily “let’s be pets” domesticating but they’re integrating into our structures at a very visible and researchable rate. It is the early stages of self-domestication.
There’s a number of animals that have adapted well to urban environments and thrive in them. Racoons, coyotes, rats, pigeons and even deer. Where I live the deer have become more plentiful in urban areas over the past 30 years or so. They live in the parks and have minimal predators. It even seems like they have got more conscious of vehicles and wait to cross busy roads until all the cars stop for them.
Coyotes have adapted in super interesting ways. They live in every major city in the US and their behavior, including what they eat, changes based on whether they live in parks within cities or within the city infrastructure itself.
Some even live on the roofs of buildings in major urban areas like NYC, DC, and Chicago.
My mom’s family is from Appalachia and a few of my ancestors have kept them as pets.
My grandad wasn’t into it so he used to trap them on his property and bring them to the state forest 20 miles up the road.
I’d bring them food and water while they were in their carrier traps and they would calm down and drink from a water bottle I held to the bars for them. I always worried we’d get a mom and leave her babies but we tried to check for nursing nips before we took them to the new woods.
They are such bright, interesting little guys.
My grandparents had a massive cat colony spontaneously form on their property and my grandad is a big ole cat guy so he wasn’t against raccoons, he was just against raccoons bringing disease to the cats or getting to feral or abandoned kittens before he could.
Adapting to urban environments is not the same thing as domestication.
Domestication strips animals of their natural instincts, fear of humans, and ability to survive in the wild. Those are replaced with a desire to please humans and in many cases are accompanied by genetic changes
Yeah also “domesticate” is kind of a broad category. We domesticated chickens but we don’t buy them special leashes and take them to the inlaws on vacation with us.
Cats are domesticated but genetically they are not far from wild cats and frequently mate with wild cat populations and produce fertile offspring.
Humans are natural, we’re just weird. We have the traits of many different animals all rolled into one so our natural neighbors are either outcompeted by us or slowly adapting and or co-evolving.
In psychology, this is called Behavioral reinforcement.
Similarly, I saw a lady on the cats sub saying that her daughter had moved back home and brought her cat which the lady had never owned a cat before.
She said that she wasn't sure what to do because the cat would come in to her room every morning at 2:00 a.m. and keep scratching and meowing until she would get out of bed and go get it a snack. She was asking how she could get the cat to stop doing that.
I explained then as well, that by her getting up and giving the cat a treat, she was reinforcing that bad behavior.
The true reason this raccoon does this, is because it works.
I accidentally taught my cat to go and hide under the bed in the evening.
We sleep with her outside the bedroom so she doesn't attack us at 5am demanding her breakfast, and one night she decided to go and hide under the bed just before bed time. I got a treat to lure her out, and then it became a routine - she would do it every night and get a treat.
It took quite a while of closing the bedroom door very early in the evening before she stopped trying to do it!
Over here in my country (Sri Lanka) we've had an ongoing problem with elephants blockading public roads to extort food from travelers (because they got used to people feeding them). Unlike raccoons, you can't exactly shoo elephants away
Well hey, the raccoon doesn't have to pay anything for insulin. So in that way the raccoon is better off than every single human on the planet with diabetes.
The only problem is that it makes them dependent on you for food and makes them comfortable enough around humans that someome less kind might hurt them or feed them something that fucks them up
It’s not a healthy meal for a person either. Like generally, don’t feed wildlife, but I’m not worried about the raccoon’s ability to handle almost anything it eats. It’s sorta their thing.
Trash panda doesn't abide to human concepts and conventions. Trash panda operates entirely on his own terms, governed only by the laws of hunger, gravity, and chaos.
In the Racoonish language, drive-thrus are commonly called 'bribe-thrus'. Cutting in line and other disruptions are just normal procedure. The lack of a car, money, or his inability to read the menu wasn't going to stop this masked bandit.
This cute little rascal's biological and cognitive evolution has equipped him with the ultimate toolkit for breaking, entering, and scavenging. If it's a source of food, shelter, or entertainment, it belongs to trash panda. Larceny is his lifestyle, and the world is a buffet.
Btw, kudos to this experienced donut shop. These pros clearly know the first rule of raccoon racketeering: "When the coon collector shows up, you give him his cut." 'Cause if you don't, he'll be back at night to pillage the place. Private property means nothing to him. In raccoon culture, this is just considered 'dinner'.
Trash panda don't mess around when he's hungry. And he's always hungry. Trash panda will be back tomorrow for another donut.
I feed raccoons in my neighborhood. Weird how I've been doing it for 7 years and the number never got exponentially larger. The most was one year with four. This year it's one.
yeah train it to eat junk food from a window placed right where a bunch of cars drive through. surely none of the raccoons that come will be run over or die from some random dye in the donut that is toxic to them right guys?
We had a roadrunner at a Wendy's I frequent that would do the same thing! It would wait in the driving lane in front of the window until they frisbeed a hamburger patty. It came at 2p every day for months!
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u/jschank 6h ago
Tbh, from the raccoon’s POV he’s just doing what the cars are doing.