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When I saw your comment on "Comment of the Moment", I clicked on it hoping, praying, that it would be one of those videos where there's a camera rigged up to a weather balloon in the stratosphere, with something goofy like a rubber duck in the foreground, only this time the rubber duck would be a dead raccoon.

This video's almost as good though.

I have found that one can actually grab a possum by the tail and hoist it up without being bitten. Some care is required, but that's something I would never think of trying with, say, a raccoon.

Discussion leads to all of our knowledge of raccoons increasing to 11. I did not know that they are washers. I thought they were trash diggers.

I remember a raccoon at a zoo who was behind just a bars cage and young guy was goading him with his shiny keys. He let me try and the thing that stood out most was the paws were the softest. I've also seen them fight like crazy in a garbage bin so...why is one in a kitchen?

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I said they can feel more when dousing. The racoon is simply examining the items.

"Their paws contain highly developed nerves, and the water actually makes their paws more sensitive.

"Dabbling behavior in water is a fixed motor pattern in raccoons. Since only captive raccoons exhibit food-dousing behavior, scientists believe that washing food is simply a substitute for normal dabbling behavior, which has no other outlet in captivity,"

http://www.sungazette.com/page/content.detail/id/564573.html


Feeling things underwater is what they do. Why do you imagine the owners have supplied the racoon with a water bowl full of toys? It is to occupy its attention.

But the Wikipedia paragraph you quote speaks only of them washing their food, not every single item they come across.
Maybe those owners have not been feeding it, or maybe it thinks it's an 'Apple' phone (Apple phones aren't waterproof so that makes it easy to identify them even (especially?) if you're a raccoon).

That is exactly what they do. The water enables them to feel things with more detail. They "wash" all their food and apparently everything else as a way to examine it.

"[This] aspect of raccoon behavior is so well known that it gives the animal part of its scientific name, Procyon lotor; "lotor" is neo-Latin for "washer"."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raccoon#Dousing

'Zactly. Carry 14 stitches on my left forearm from our 'domesticated' raccoon in its 3rd year of living in the house. Is now a hat.

That's a Raccoon - not a Cat.

I liked the raccoon better when it didn't talk.

have never seen a raccoon, do not believe they exist

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