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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| In my partial listing of intelligent species yesterday, I left out an important one. But my random number generator reminded me today, by pointing to this article from Atlas Obscura: Can You Outsmart a Raccoon?  Recent studies show just how tricky these trash pandas can be, from opening locks to nabbing DoorDash orders. Well, that last bit won't happen to me because I don't use DoorTrash. But I have caught those masked marauders in the actual trash. I also once caught one that had opened the door to the house, snuck in, and scarfed down the cat food. While many other species around the world are in decline, raccoons are actually thriving, and do particularly well in urban areas, says lead author Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Okay, that tracks, but... "cognitive ecologist?" Raccoons are strong—they can push a cinder block off a trash can—and tenacious. The more we do to keep them out, the more skills they learn for breaking in, leading to a cognitive arms race between people and raccoons. You know how people keep saying that if cats ever got opposable thumbs, we'd be in big trouble? Well, raccoons don't have opposable thumbs, either, but their little paws grip stuff just fine without them. In 2016, for example, the city of Toronto spent 31 million CAD (that’s about $23 million) on raccoon-resistant waste bins. While they deterred most would-be robbers, certain tricksters had no problem solving the new puzzle. The city has continued to release new versions of the bin, trying to outsmart Toronto’s most persistent trash invaders. All due respect to our Canadian friends, that right there cracked me up. The word raccoon can be traced back to the Proto-Algonquian word ärähkun, deriving from the phrase “he scratches with his hands.” The name was more directly from a specific Algonquian language, spoken by the Powhatans here in what would become Virginia. While it’s hard to compare intelligence across species, says Stanton, she says that some recent studies show the neural density of raccoons is “more similar to primates than other carnivore species.” Also, from what I've been hearing, neither brain size nor neural density is strongly correlated with those traits we call intelligence. Still, there's no mistaking that at least some raccoons exhibit advanced problem-solving skills. However, we have learned that raccoons, once thought to be solitary, are in cahoots with each other far more than we knew. Great. Now we have to deal with raccoon gangs. Lots more at the article, which, most importantly, features multiple pictures of impossibly cute raccoons. |
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