A lot of things i thought were cute and nice like dolphines, ducks, cats (i saw one cat eat anothers new born), dogs (multiple cases of eating dead owners due to a variety of reasons starting from trying to wake em up to other malicious reasons), hamsters etc turned out to be wrong . Raccoons are the only thing i believe in anymore so give it to me straight are they as they seem ?
Are raccoons evil? Absolutely not. Like humans, some individual animals may engage in anti-social activities (be assholes) but, with a few exceptions, non-human animals do not engage in things from a long-term perspective that is required to develop philosophy, culture, ethics, and morality. Another requirement is likely possessing Theory of the Mind; an understanding that other beings have their own mental states (intention, desires, knowledge, etc.). Few non-human animals have been demonstrated to have this ability and frequently, the evidence suggests that it is also not an ability present in all members of the species.
So, the TL;DR is: No and very few animals could have the capacity to be “evil”.
So, what are they?
Cute, inquisitive, intelligent, clever, and, yes, fairly dangerous. Raccoons have sharp teeth and claws that can do serious damage to humans and houses, and they can be very deadly to cats and dogs. For canines, it’s generally smaller breeds that are at risk but, in some places, like Western Washington state, populations of raccoons have been observed hunting in packs to take down larger dogs.
Why did I mention houses? Well, raccoons are intelligent and understand enough to get themselves into trouble and cause serious property damage. There are multiple accounts of people feeding local raccoons then, after coming home from a vacation, discovering that the raccoons that they had been feeding had pulled shingles off the roof and damaged the building’s sheathing in an attempt to get the food that had been suddenly cut-off.
Additionally, raccoons can carry rather dangerous infectious diseases. On the viral side, they are a major vector of the rabies virus as well as distemper. For bacteria, they have been shown to be vector of listeria and leptospirosis. They also can carry a number of parasites, including acting as the primary host for Baylisascaris procyonis, which is a particularly resilient roundworm (eggs can survive 20% bleach solution) that can cause encephalitis in humans.
Trash pandas are awesome but, best enjoyed from a safe distance.
No. They are not.
One of my friends keeps chickens in a small coop surrounded by chicken wire. A while back some raccoons killed most of his chickens by pulling pieces of them through the small holes in the wire fence. A few years after the incident I was visiting my friend. While we were hanging out in the backyard I stepped on a dessicated chicken wing…
When they are in Kill Mode they are absolutely vicious. They’d reach through the fence and pull the chickens’ heads off.
A Raccoon would ask are humans evil for treating the world and nature as their privately owned land to do whatever they want without regards to other habitants.
I saw a video of a lady trying to help baby raccoons that had fallen through an open window climb up and get to their mother. The mother attacked her. They don’t know our intent. They just see a threat to their babies. That’s not evil. That’s just nature and animals. The lady was pissed that it tried to get her when she was trying to help, which is understandable. But I don’t think she thought, “oh you evil piece of shit.” More like, “I wish you knew I was trying to help.”
Raccoon-medicine is the medicine of helping-friends.
There was a meme going 'round, where somebody had put up a bird-feeder or something, and they had it about 1 yard/metre off the ground, to prevent the raccoons from getting food from it…
… a whole heap of them formed a living-ladder, so one of 'em could get at the food.
That is the brilliantest demonstration of exactly what some Indigenous religions have said about 'em, that anybody could ever ask for.
Read “Medicine Cards” by Jamie Sams, for a good survey of animal-spirits: it’s reasonably accurate.
I’d add to it that upright owl-medicine is the medicine of meditation, but Indigenous religions didn’t dig into that kind of thing, only inner-winds peoples did ( Asian region ).
( and anybody who goes & lives among wilderness for awhile will learn animals’ natures/spirits specific to that locale, obviously )
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Is this AI?
Wow you really overshot that post.
They technically are able to flip you off.
My dad had been feeding raccoons and squirrels but the raccoon was still hungry one day and killed and ate the slowest squirrel. I wouldn’t call it evil though. Nature is metal as some people say.
Capybaras. Animals aren’t evil but if you’re trying to think of a chill animal that does no wrong by human standards, it’s capybaras.
Nature gets brutal sometimes. One of my dogs once killed another dog, but she’s always been a total sweetheart to me.
Raccoons are cute, curious, critters with thumbs. They like to wash their food. They’re adorable!
But they are also wild creatures that will bite when scared and can carry dangerous diseases.
Nature gets brutal.
Was it a smaller dog that was eating your dogs food or that surprised your dog?
She was named Beta, a yellow lab who was housed with a yorkshire terrier, constantly yapping and nipping at her.
Eventually she snapped.
At the time the owner was pregnant so there was no way they could take the risk.
My wife and I adopted her because we already had another dog from the litter, her sister Violet. We renamed her to Veda.
Never had a problem. She growls softly when her lines are crossed but is otherwise a perfectly snuggly girl. Getting on in years but still with us.
Animals lack morality. Raccoons would hunt humans for fun and food if they were capable.
If you have chickens, you will automatically dislike raccoons.
If given the opportunity, raccoons will get into a coop and kill all chickens. It won’t eat the chickens. It will just kill them.
why? beef with dinosaurs or something??
Like many other mammels male raccoon will kill offspring of other males to speed up the mating availibility of female raccoons.
Fuck, this one did it for me .
I think it’s better to not look at it as good and evil but as joy and pain.
There will always be both joy and pain in the world. And there isn’t even a ‘balance’ between the two. Some experience more pain than joy. Some, more joy than pain.
Part of the trick is to learn to focus on the joy. The pain will be there and requires acknowledgment, not attention.
Maybe stop anthropomorphizing animals with human concepts like morality and just accept them for as they are?
No . why should i ? I can understand they are what they are but that doesn’t mean i have to like or accept them i am free to dislike them .
This is a really toxic way to look at animals. You should enjoy them not because they are cute and loving but because they are incredible beings that help craft the ecosystems in which we thrive. If not like them, then hopefully you can at least respect and accept them for what they are.
As to your original question, raccoons are incredible animals. One of the few species who are so adaptable that they can manage to survive in our concrete world, despite our efforts to stop them. They’re very intelligent and dexterous and it’s incredible they continue to survive and borderline thrive at times.
See my edit it explains my view .
You’re are, it’s just you’re having a weird problem thanks to your weird beliefs, which would be remedied by trying to actually align your beliefs with reality, but instead trying to get Lemmy users to help you decide where raccoons align on your good/bad chart lmao.
Wtf does " you’re are" mean ?
Okay I understand now that you lack some basic social skills. Maybe work on those before engaging on the internet.
🖕
Lol guess I hit on a sore spot
No. I just thought an imoji was enough .
So you don’t like or accept any mammals because they are animals?
Wut ? Wdym accept how do you do that I think everyone is neat and their all strangers anyway.
What the others said, animals aren’t “evil”. But I’m curious now, what did hamsters do?
I used to work in a pet store.
There were two white with black spot “teddy bear” hamsters that had “wet tail”(diarrhea) and they were being kept in the back together while they were given antibiotics to get them well so they could be sold. They had it when they came in, unfortunately very common for factory farm raised hamsters.
After a day or two of them being there I came in to open for the day and give them their meds. I flipped over the plastic igloo they were nesting in and there was only one there. I closed the store the previous night and had given them their meds, I knew there was two in there 12 hours prior. I was standing there looking at the 5 gallon aquarium they were in and was trying to think through the early morning brain fog as a bloody hamster face poked out from under the singular fur ball.
I then understood that the one hamster has eaten the other and hollowed it out to make a cow pattern meat igloo out of its sickly cage mate. Hamsters may be cute, but they will upcycle a friend into eco-friendly housing and a midnight snack. They are adorable monsters and we pretend they aren’t and give them to kids in brightly colored habitats, as if they are different than Gacy in a clown costume.
Eat their young when they are in a confined space that appears to not support the population.
In a sense, we make them eat their young by putting them in cages and breeding them.
But it is behavior learned in the wild - keep alive only the babies you can actually support, or else everyone dies.
Eating their young seems to be their first response to any form of stress actually
