@corbeRaccoons are VERY smart and make great pets. I had one when I was maybe 8 years old. I had two big problems with him. Number one was he was a thief,and a VERY good thief. I have seen him steal individual cigarettes out of one of my uncle's shirt pockets as he sat in a chair talking to us. He didn't know we had a racoon,and this was a fully-grown male coon by this time,so nobody wanted to scare him. The coon just crawled up the back of the chair and reached over his shoulder and picked them out of the pack one by one.
Other than possibly giving my uncle a stroke,his stealing was no big deal. We knew where he hid his treasures,and if anything important was missing,we would just go get it.
My bleep father decided he shouldn't be living in the house with us and sleeping with me anymore when he was a couple of years old,and built a cage attached to the rear wall of our house. And,of course,the neighborhood dogs came back and drove him nuts trying to attack him. He finely broke out of the cage and blinded one of the dogs and did some damage to another one.
Which of course resulted in animal control coming around and threatening to arrest my father for having an animal that was illegal to have,so he drove out to the swamp where we found him when he was a baby with a mother who had been ran over,and let him out to run free.
Later in life after we returned to the country,he was trapping and killing coons for their hides,and the market dropped,so he just opened the cages and let them loose. Took some of them over a month to start going away even though he had quit feeding them.
