50 Fun Facts About Raccoons

Which US president kept a raccoon named Rebecca as a pet after she was sent to be his Thanksgiving dinner?

Calvin Coolidge had never eaten raccoon and had no appetite to try it, so Rebecca got an embroidered collar and walks on a leash instead.

After a 1977 cartoon about a boy's pet raccoon became a hit, which country imported up to 1,500 raccoons a year?

Japan fell for the animated raccoon, but discarded and escaped pets bred in the wild and had spread to all 47 of the country's prefectures by 2008.

Which sense is the raccoon's most important, taking up almost two-thirds of the sensory area of its cerebral cortex?

Touch dominates a raccoon's world: whiskers above the claws let its front paws identify an object before they even reach it.

Which actor voices Rocket, the sharp-shooting raccoon bounty hunter, in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy films?

Bradley Cooper has voiced Rocket since 2014, giving a film career to a comics character who made only ten appearances in his first thirty years.

Which frontiersman's 1950s Disney television episodes set off a children's craze for raccoon-fur coonskin caps?

Davy Crockett, as played by Fess Parker, made the caps sell at a rate of 5,000 a day, though the real man is unlikely to have worn raccoon fur.

Which European country hosts the largest raccoon population outside North America, begun with pets released in 1934?

Germany's raccoons began with two pairs set free at a reservoir in Hesse, and by 2012 the country was estimated to hold more than a million.

The raccoon's scientific name, Procyon lotor, ends with a Latin word describing a habit with food; what does it mean?

Washer is the meaning of lotor, yet the animal is not cleaning its meal: water softens the hard layer on its paws and makes them more sensitive.

Raccoon City, overrun by zombies after an Umbrella Corporation leak, is the setting of which video game series?

Resident Evil hides Umbrella's bioweapons lab beneath Raccoon City, where most citizens have no idea it exists until the monsters get out.

'Rocky Raccoon', a country-style ballad about a love triangle in the Black Hills, is on which 1968 Beatles release?

The White Album song was begun during the band's meditation retreat in Rishikesh, India, and its hero was first called Rocky Sassoon.

To climb down a tree headfirst, a raccoon rotates which part of its body until it points backwards?

Hind feet that swivel to face the rear make the headfirst descent possible, an unusual ability for a mammal of the raccoon's size.

Born blind and deaf in spring litters of two to five, baby raccoons are known by which name?

Kits already display the dark mask against their pale fur at birth, about three weeks before their eyes open for the first time.

The black fur around a raccoon's eyes, often likened to a bandit's mask, may help the animal by doing what?

Reducing glare may sharpen a raccoon's night vision, and the bold face pattern is also thought to help raccoons read one another's expressions.

In the folklore of the Abenaki people of New England, the raccoon spirit Azeban plays which stock role?

Trickster is Azeban's part: he fools other animals to win food, and in one tale tries to outshout a waterfall until he tumbles in.

What is the name of the pet raccoon who accompanies the title character of Disney's 1995 film Pocahontas?

Meeko was created by Disney veteran Joe Grant, and the film-makers liked raccoons because their little hands and masked faces suggested a thief.

Which Cartoon Network series follows Mordecai the blue jay and Rigby the raccoon, groundskeepers at a local park?

Regular Show found one of its heroes by accident, when its creator doodled a raccoon spinning a hula hoop and the character Rigby was born.

Tom Nook, the shopkeeper of Animal Crossing, looks like a raccoon but is based on which East Asian animal?

Tanuki, also called raccoon dogs, belong to the dog family and are no close kin of raccoons; Nook's original name, Tanukichi, spells out the link.

A Purdue University study blamed raccoons for 87% of the damage done to which farm crop?

Corn tempts raccoons most in its milk stage, when sweet corn becomes the most popular of all the fruits and crops they raid.

The word raccoon entered English from which Native American language, recorded by John Smith in colonial Virginia?

Powhatan speakers gave Smith a word he wrote down as aroughcun, a term meaning an animal that scratches with its hands.

Which 18th-century naturalist classed the raccoon as a bear, placing it in the genus Ursus?

Carl Linnaeus named the animal a long-tailed bear in 1740, and it took until 1780 for the raccoon to be given a genus of its own.

Mapache, the Spanish word for raccoon, comes from the language of which people of ancient Mexico?

Aztecs called the animal mapachtli, the one who takes everything in its hands, and linked supernatural abilities to the females in particular.

Which long-nosed member of the raccoon family travels in noisy bands of females and young while adult males live alone?

Coati males are such loners that the longer name coatimundi comes from a Tupian phrase meaning lone coati.

Which rainforest member of the raccoon family has a prehensile tail and is nicknamed the honey bear?

Kinkajou sightings are rare because the animal is strictly nocturnal, and the nickname comes from captives that eagerly eat honey.

Alongside bobcats and coyotes, which North American owl ranks among the raccoon's most important natural predators?

Great horned owl attacks fall mostly on young raccoons, and predators of any kind are not a significant cause of raccoon deaths.

Which disease, able to wipe out most of a local population, is the leading natural killer of North American raccoons?

Distemper can leave a raccoon with rabies-like symptoms, but unlike rabies the virus does not affect humans.

Raccoon droppings can carry the eggs of which type of parasite, a serious danger to people who breathe or swallow them?

Roundworm eggs from raccoons are so robust that bleach alone will not destroy them; burning or hot sodium hydroxide is needed.

Which actor voiced RJ, the scheming raccoon who cons a family of animals in DreamWorks' Over the Hedge?

Bruce Willis played RJ as a hustler on a deadline, with one week to replace the food he ruined for a bear called Vincent.

Which company animated Pom Poko, the 1994 film whose shape-shifting animals are called raccoons in the English dub?

Studio Ghibli's heroes fight to save their forest home from developers, and the title echoes the sound of them drumming on their bellies.

Which Nintendo platform game lets its plumber hero grab a leaf, grow a raccoon tail and fly for a short time?

Super Mario Bros. 3 nearly turned its hero into a centaur instead, before the designers settled on a raccoon tail with limited flight.

Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton belong to a lodge named after raccoons in which classic 1950s sitcom?

The Honeymooners made Ralph an eager member of the Raccoon Lodge, though in several episodes the lodge blackboard lists his dues as unpaid.

Full-length raccoon coats became a status symbol among which group of Americans during the 1920s?

College students wore them partly for warmth: many cars of the day had open tops and poor heaters or none at all, so winter drives were cold.

Members of whose expedition were the first Europeans to leave a written record of the raccoon?

Christopher Columbus's crew met an animal that baffled later taxonomists, who linked it in turn to dogs, cats, badgers and bears.

The smallest raccoons live in the south of which US state, home of the Ten Thousand Islands subspecies?

Florida's coastal raccoons typically weigh just 1.8 to 2.7 kg, while the largest wild raccoon on record reached 28.4 kg.

Procyon cancrivorus, a raccoon of South American marshes and jungles, takes its common name from eating which animals?

Crabs give the species its name but are far from its whole diet, and the northern raccoon also hunts them wherever they are available.

The critically endangered pygmy raccoon lives only on which island off Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula?

Cozumel split from the mainland in the late Pleistocene, and its raccoons became a smaller species with a golden-yellow tail.

The Trash Pandas, a Double-A baseball team named for raccoons and the local space industry, play in which US state?

Alabama's Rocket City Trash Pandas honour both Huntsville's space work and the determination and ingenuity of the bin-raiding raccoon.

Raccoons avoid woods dominated by which tree, whose smooth bark is too slippery for them to climb?

Beech bark offers no grip, and that matters because raccoons depend on vertical structures to climb when they feel threatened.

A Tuscarora folk tale explains how raccoons catch so many of which freshwater animal, a favourite prey?

Crayfish suit a raccoon because it prefers prey that is easy to catch and only occasionally goes after birds or mammals.

Which famously keen-nosed breed was crossed into many coonhound lines to improve their tracking of raccoons?

Bloodhound crosses fixed a flaw in imported foxhounds, which lost the scent and milled about when a raccoon took to a tree.

Procyon, the raccoon's genus name, is also the brightest star in which constellation?

Canis Minor's bright star crosses the sky just ahead of Sirius, the Dog Star, which is why the Greek name Procyon means before the dog.

In an early-1900s study, raccoons opened complex locks with a learning speed judged equal to that of which animals?

Rhesus macaques were the benchmark after raccoons cracked 11 of 13 locks in fewer than ten tries, even when the locks were rearranged or flipped.

Raccoons see well in twilight thanks to which light-reflecting layer that sits behind the retina of the eye?

Tapetum lucidum tissue helps in dim light, yet sight matters little to raccoons, which have poor long-distance vision and may be colour blind.

Raccoons walk with heels and soles flat on the ground, as bears and humans do; what is this gait called?

Plantigrade walking suits an animal that often rears up on its back legs to examine objects with its front paws.

Which senator made a coonskin cap his trademark while twice seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1950s?

Estes Kefauver first donned the cap in 1948 to laugh off a political boss's adverts likening him to a raccoon-like Communist puppet.

Which developer created the PlayStation stealth games starring a raccoon thief, a turtle named Bentley and a hippo?

Sucker Punch made the original Sly trilogy for the PlayStation 2, then left the fourth game about its raccoon to another developer.

Raccoons grow larger toward the cold north of their range, a textbook example of which ecological principle?

Bergmann's rule holds that bigger bodies turn up in colder places, and a raccoon entering winter can weigh twice what it did in spring.

Which country released more than a thousand raccoons between 1936 and 1958 to found a population hunted for fur?

Soviet Union releases mostly failed: of nine regions tried, raccoons took firm hold in few, among them Belarus and Azerbaijan.

The first recorded sightings of raccoons living in a city came in the 1920s from a suburb of which Ohio city?

Cincinnati was only the start: since the 1950s raccoons have also settled in Washington, Chicago, Toronto and New York City.

Sterling North's 1963 memoir of raising a baby raccoon during his Wisconsin boyhood goes by which one-word title?

Rascal rode in the boy's bicycle basket and joined him in a pie-eating contest, in a book subtitled A Memoir of a Better Era.

In the Canadian cartoon The Raccoons, Cyril Sneer, the greedy millionaire who threatens the forest, is which animal?

Aardvark tycoon Cyril Sneer mellows as the series goes on, ending up a sympathetic antihero with more responsible business habits.

Ranger Rick, the children's nature magazine named after a raccoon character, is published by which US organization?

National Wildlife Federation membership had tripled within five years of the magazine's 1967 launch, such was its popularity.