Raccoons
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50 free Raccoons trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The raccoon is one of the most recognisable wild animals in North America: a ringed tail, a black mask and a pair of front paws nimble enough to open latches, jars and rubbish bins. It has followed people into suburbs and city centres, and it has turned up on other continents too, sometimes with a little human help. This quiz looks at the animal from every angle. Some questions cover biology: how raccoons sense the world, what they eat, how they raise their young and which relatives share their family tree. Others follow the raccoon into history and culture, from Native American stories and frontier fashion to a president's pet, cartoon sidekicks, comic-book heroes and video games. It is written for animal lovers, pub quiz teams, teachers and anyone who has caught a masked visitor on the back porch at night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will pick up a few surprises along the way.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US president kept a raccoon named Rebecca as a pet after she was sent to be his Thanksgiving dinner?
Calvin Coolidge
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.
Q 02After a 1977 cartoon about a boy's pet raccoon became a hit, which country imported up to 1,500 raccoons a year?
Japan
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.
Q 03Which sense is the raccoon's most important, taking up almost two-thirds of the sensory area of its cerebral cortex?
Touch
Touch dominates a raccoon's world: whiskers above the claws let its front paws identify an object before they even reach it.
Q 04Which actor voices Rocket, the sharp-shooting raccoon bounty hunter, in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy films?
Bradley Cooper
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.
Q 05Which frontiersman's 1950s Disney television episodes set off a children's craze for raccoon-fur coonskin caps?
Davy Crockett
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.
Q 06Which European country hosts the largest raccoon population outside North America, begun with pets released in 1934?
Germany
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.
Q 07The raccoon's scientific name, Procyon lotor, ends with a Latin word describing a habit with food; what does it mean?
Washer
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.
Q 08Raccoon City, overrun by zombies after an Umbrella Corporation leak, is the setting of which video game series?
Resident Evil
Resident Evil hides Umbrella's bioweapons lab beneath Raccoon City, where most citizens have no idea it exists until the monsters get out.
Q 09'Rocky Raccoon', a country-style ballad about a love triangle in the Black Hills, is on which 1968 Beatles release?
The White Album
The White Album song was begun during the band's meditation retreat in Rishikesh, India, and its hero was first called Rocky Sassoon.
Q 10To climb down a tree headfirst, a raccoon rotates which part of its body until it points backwards?
Hind feet
Hind feet that swivel to face the rear make the headfirst descent possible, an unusual ability for a mammal of the raccoon's size.
Q 11Born blind and deaf in spring litters of two to five, baby raccoons are known by which name?
Kits
Kits already display the dark mask against their pale fur at birth, about three weeks before their eyes open for the first time.
Q 12The black fur around a raccoon's eyes, often likened to a bandit's mask, may help the animal by doing what?
Reducing glare
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.
Q 13In the folklore of the Abenaki people of New England, the raccoon spirit Azeban plays which stock role?
Trickster
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.
Q 21Which long-nosed member of the raccoon family travels in noisy bands of females and young while adult males live alone?
Coati
Coati males are such loners that the longer name coatimundi comes from a Tupian phrase meaning lone coati.
Q 22Which rainforest member of the raccoon family has a prehensile tail and is nicknamed the honey bear?
Kinkajou
Kinkajou sightings are rare because the animal is strictly nocturnal, and the nickname comes from captives that eagerly eat honey.
Q 23Alongside bobcats and coyotes, which North American owl ranks among the raccoon's most important natural predators?
Great horned owl
Great horned owl attacks fall mostly on young raccoons, and predators of any kind are not a significant cause of raccoon deaths.
Q 14What is the name of the pet raccoon who accompanies the title character of Disney's 1995 film Pocahontas?
Meeko
Meeko was created by Disney veteran Joe Grant, and the film-makers liked raccoons because their little hands and masked faces suggested a thief.
Q 15Which Cartoon Network series follows Mordecai the blue jay and Rigby the raccoon, groundskeepers at a local park?
Regular Show
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.
Q 16Tom Nook, the shopkeeper of Animal Crossing, looks like a raccoon but is based on which East Asian animal?
Tanuki
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.
Q 17A Purdue University study blamed raccoons for 87% of the damage done to which farm crop?
Corn
Corn tempts raccoons most in its milk stage, when sweet corn becomes the most popular of all the fruits and crops they raid.
Q 18The word raccoon entered English from which Native American language, recorded by John Smith in colonial Virginia?
Powhatan
Powhatan speakers gave Smith a word he wrote down as aroughcun, a term meaning an animal that scratches with its hands.
Q 19Which 18th-century naturalist classed the raccoon as a bear, placing it in the genus Ursus?
Carl Linnaeus
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.
Q 20Mapache, the Spanish word for raccoon, comes from the language of which people of ancient Mexico?
Aztecs
Aztecs called the animal mapachtli, the one who takes everything in its hands, and linked supernatural abilities to the females in particular.
Q 24Which disease, able to wipe out most of a local population, is the leading natural killer of North American raccoons?
Distemper
Distemper can leave a raccoon with rabies-like symptoms, but unlike rabies the virus does not affect humans.
Q 25Raccoon droppings can carry the eggs of which type of parasite, a serious danger to people who breathe or swallow them?
Roundworm
Roundworm eggs from raccoons are so robust that bleach alone will not destroy them; burning or hot sodium hydroxide is needed.
Q 26Which actor voiced RJ, the scheming raccoon who cons a family of animals in DreamWorks' Over the Hedge?
Bruce Willis
Bruce Willis played RJ as a hustler on a deadline, with one week to replace the food he ruined for a bear called Vincent.
Q 27Which company animated Pom Poko, the 1994 film whose shape-shifting animals are called raccoons in the English dub?
Studio Ghibli
Studio Ghibli's heroes fight to save their forest home from developers, and the title echoes the sound of them drumming on their bellies.
Q 28Which Nintendo platform game lets its plumber hero grab a leaf, grow a raccoon tail and fly for a short time?
Super Mario Bros. 3
Super Mario Bros. 3 nearly turned its hero into a centaur instead, before the designers settled on a raccoon tail with limited flight.
Q 29Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton belong to a lodge named after raccoons in which classic 1950s sitcom?
The Honeymooners
The Honeymooners made Ralph an eager member of the Raccoon Lodge, though in several episodes the lodge blackboard lists his dues as unpaid.
Q 30Full-length raccoon coats became a status symbol among which group of Americans during the 1920s?
College students
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.