Lived in a neighborhood with racoons years ago.
Wife was terrified of them when they came in our yard.
I would have to go out and chase them off.
But if I ran toward them and they stood their ground, that was it. No way.
That means they are sick.
If you ever got close enough to one to actually pick it up you are likely in big trouble.
@240B Bet you that you only do that once.
I see videos of people praising what they call their 'trash pandas'. They keep them as pets.
And I just shake my head. These guys have no idea what they are playing with.
I had one for a pet when I was a kid,maybe 6 years old. It's mother had been ran over while trying to cross the road,and the baby coon was just sitting beside her crying,so we picked him up and took him home.
SOB grew to be huge eating dry dog food and table scraps. Loved to play hide and seek. He would run behind a chair and I would poke my head around it pretending to be trying to catch him,and he would jump off the top of the chair to the top of my head and hang on. It was like wearing a live Davy Crocket cap. He was as tame as a kitten.
Loved to steal shiny stuff and hide it,too. Just loved to steal,period. Had a uncle come to visit once we rarely saw,and he didn't know there was a coon in the house,and it just never occured to use to tell him. So,he is sitting in a big padded sofa-type chair talking,and I see the coon coming up the back of the chair and started to panice. I kept my cool though,and decided THAT was not the perfect time to tell him we had a coon,and it was right behind him.
As usual,he had play/stealing on his mind. I sat there and watched him steal a couple of Lucky Strikes from my uncle's shirt pocket,one by one,then go back down to the floor and run off to hide it.
Then my asshat father decided having a coon in the house wasn't cool,despite the fact he had lived and slept in the house since the day we got him,and build a cage to attach to the outside wall of our house,and put him in there. That didn't last long because nobody could sleep for all the barking and snarling going on as the neighborhood dogs discovered there was a coon "cornered in a box" on our back wall.
We ended up taking him out to the edge of the deep woods and letting him go.
Later,after we moved back out to live in a rural area,my father was trapping coons to skin and sell their hides,and he had a bunch of them in a pen waiting for the price to go back up when it went even lower,so he decided to just let them go. A couple of them hung around for a few weeks before leaving.
Coons are VERY smart animals,and pretty easy to tame. All you have to do is feed them.
NOT a good idea to pick a wild one up,though. There is no where you can grab him that he can't turn around in his skin and start eating you alive. They are FIERCE when scared.
