I sometimes wonder why we humans decided to domesticate some animals and not others. As a species, we’ve been keeping dogs as “pets” for over 20 thousand years. Cats have been domesticated for…well, actually, recent studies seem to show that cats have never really BEEN domesticated.

What’s really the difference between a dog or cat and, say, a fox? Sure, foxes aren’t (normally) kept as pets because they’re not domesticated but that’s really just a circular argument: dogs are domesticated because they’re domesticated; foxes aren’t domesticated because they aren’t domesticated. But why? Were ancient wolves (ancestors of the first dogs) more prone to domestication than other similarly sized mammals? Or did they have more to offer to humans than a fox so that’s why they got selected as companions? What other animals may have been common pets if humans had found them either more useful or more compliant?

Let’s talk today about raccoons. Specifically, would a raccoon make a good pet? I have one primary argument for “they would”. Here it is:

OMG, how adorbs is that? That raccoon looks exactly like me when I’m sitting at home having a snack, right down to the fact that he’s not wearing pants.

If that isn’t enough to convince you that we should all get raccoons as pets, here’s another video of ‘coons doing other cute things like wrasslin with a dog, eating pizza and being babies:

In that face of this very, very strong “pro raccoons as pets” argument, I feel it only fair to share the “con” side of the debate. I could only think of two good counterpoints:

It’s illegal in the state of Texas

AND

They’re only adorable for brief spans of time. As soon as you turn you’re back on them, they’re using their primate-like hands, nearly opposable thumbs and inquisitive little vermin minds to turn your house into a big pile of uninhabitable litter.

Oh, and also: rabies.

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