In December, 2019, a raccoon rambled across the bucolic cobbled streets of Erfurt, Germany, in broad daylight. It stepped unsteadily on small grey paws, its distinctive banded tail bobbing as curious passersby gawped and took photos, delighted by the spectacle. Earlier that day, the creature had encountered a nearby Christmas market and, reportedly, imbibed from the abandoned cups of mulled wine that littered the ground.
The raccoon-fur craze led to a handful of European entrepreneurs starting commercial breeding operations to produce the pelts. In 1934, German fur farmer Rolf Haag released two pairs of raccoons into the wild for “the pure joy of being able to enrich our fauna,” and in 1945, two dozen of the wily creatures escaped a fur farm after it was apparently hit by an Allied bomb.
Because a female raccoon bears, on average, five pups a year, and those babies can survive on their own once they’re only four months old, even a handful can spread quickly. Generally, young females will stay with their mothers as males scout new territories. In Germany, hunting records reflect that exponential growth: In 1995, hunters there reported killing 3,000 raccoons. Two decades later, that number hit 100,000 raccoons shot or trapped in a single year.
a black-and-white image of a hunchbacked raccoon on a camera he set up to record wildlife. Historically, the creatures only lived in the province’s southernmost regions, but warming winter temperatures and increased year-round rainfall, both linked to the climate crisis, mean that’s no longer the case.
When encroaching onto a new environment, raccoons voraciously gravitate toward the tastiest and most energy-dense foods they can find. Because they eat both plants and other animals, they swiftly start to outcompete local wildlife for food or even eat those creatures themselves – including frogs, turtles, bird eggs and even baby rabbits.
That hard-to-control brazenness certainly plays a role in why raccoons can drive us up the wall. “When raccoons look at us, they aren’t looking at us as superiors, they’re looking at us as a potential danger, certainly, but also potential sources of food, shelter or entertainment,” says Mr. Justice. “That’s not a position that a great many humans in the urbanized industrialized West are familiar with.
As a teenager, I often spent fall weekends helping my grandfather on our family’s apple orchard in Streetsville, Ont. On his farm, Victor Pinchin considered raccoons, skunks and other wildlife such as deer as pests, fit only for shooting or drowning, and we never asked too many questions about where the creatures he trapped ended up.
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