Raccoon City

Raccoons, raccoons, raccoons. Jeeze. I learned that there are multiple acceptable forms of the plural of "raccoon". [[Kinda like e^x being it's own derivative. (This only makes a little sense now.)]]

A friend of mine cared for a raccoon kit for almost two years. One day it left the backyard and never returned, and we all felt that was probably for the best. But in those 20+ months I got to play with the young man named Bandit. Playing with him was so much fun; it was like a rascally dog mixed with a clever toddler. I grew a deep affinity for raccoon in general.

On Netflix there was a program about raccoon and about how city raccoons are becoming smarter because of all the anti-raccoon technology designed to repel them. We're making them smarter. How awesome is that.

There is a raccoon family that I saw after dark while leaving my university's campus by bike last year, and there's a family close by to us here in Long Beach. According to most sources, raccoons are pretty much everywhere.

The Netflix program discussed an experiment where they caught one of the family-group leaders for a raccoon troop and radio-collared her. They were able to track her and her family group's movements. They were surprised to see that she and her kits never left a rectangle centered on a few blocks in an urban neighborhood.

The scientists remembered having seen scat and other proof of raccoon occupation all over town, and snatched up some more raccoon close by to the original test subject. The following is a picture with each family group's movements traced out in different colored ink:

Each family group has their own defined set territory. It's pretty neat, right? That's what I thought until they started to zoom out, and you start to think about how many raccoons actually live in this city and when does it become their city...

Raccoons are tough, smart, resilient, and can learn at accelerated speeds. If I had to choose land mammals to survive an apocalypse, the raccoon and the rat would be among my choices.