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Raccoons are self-domesticating and getting cuter [1]

['Gail Sherman']

Date: 2025-11-19  

Raccoons that live in close proximity to humans are developing shorter, cuter snouts and appear to be self-domesticating.

Early humans likely saw dogs as helpful companions and domesticated them. Cats, on the other hand, self-domesticated to feed on the mice and rats that are plentiful around human settlements. Many domesticated animals share common genetic traits, such as shorter snouts, floppy ears, and – ouch – smaller brains. Russian foxes bred for friendliness also developed these traits. Frontiers in Zoology found that urban raccoons are starting to display the same features.

City raccoons were found to have snouts that were 3.5% smaller than their woodland counterparts, indicating that they have begun the process of self-domestication. The already cute trash pandas are starting to look more like pets, perhaps in an evolutionary bid to co-exist more closely with humans. According to Scientific American:

"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."

Regrettably, domesticated is not synonymous with "tame." Please do not attempt to pet raccoons, no matter how cute they are. If anyone wants to start the process of taming raccoons, however, I am all for this.

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