From what I remember spending time on this topic, raccoons need super challenging locks as toys and TONS of engagement from their keepers because they get bored easily and bored raccoons == ultra destructive raccoons. Also, rabies.
They're pretty great pets. We had one for a while when I was a kid. Its mom got run over and we nursed it and raised it for a few months. Instinctively used the same litter box as the cats. Hung out on the couch sitting on my shoulder watching TV. Friendly and playful. Would follow people around and play with toys.
The biggest challenge is that they basically have hands. He would climb up the kitchen cabinets, grab a box of cereal, open it up and sit there eating out of it like a toddler.
We only had him for a few months before reintroducing him to the woods behind the house. I've wanted a pet raccoon again ever since.
A former girlfriend of mine had a picture of her mother holding a Raccoon. I asked her mother about it and she said that they lived out in the woods in Minnesota and they found it on the porch when it was a baby. The mother had died or something so they kinda raised it. It was free roaming in/out of the house but they could hold it and it would also get into their food. She mentioned one time it ate a bunch of mixed nuts...but didn't like one type so it left all those in the bowl. Another time it ate an entire pie...but left her one piece ("so she wouldn't get angry").
She did say it was never really a "pet"...more like a wild animal that sometimes acted like one.
This would have been in the late 70s early 80s by my guess on her age in the pictures.
They have a lot in common with housecats, except that they are more clever. Decades ago we heard a crunch crunch sound from the rear mudroom. We looked and saw a raccoon reaching in and eating dry cat out of a box with the cat looking on enviously.
Camping I heard a crunching sound, looked out from the tent to see a racoon helping itself to granola in the back of the car. Lock your doors.
I remember reading somewhere once that baby raccoons are actually quite cuddly and tame; but that when they go adolescence, they have a hormone shift that makes them aggressive enough to be unsuitable as a pet. In the story a woman who had raised a baby raccoon was attacked by it after it grew to a certain age.
Judging by the murderous sounds you hear all night here in the summer, I would not want to be cornered in a dark alley by a gang of adolescent raccoons.
>Judging by the murderous sounds you hear all night here in the summer, I would not want to be cornered in a dark alley by a gang of adolescent raccoons.
Well if you ask me adolescent raccoons are a big problem in many of our cities, I'd be worried about such a case myself.
I've heard the same thing from my mother, whose uncle had a baby raccoon as a pet. Once he got older he became mean and would yank on her hair for no reason.
There's a Japanese anime from the '70s called something like "rascal the racoon", based on an American book, which tells the story of a kid with a pet raccoon.
I've wanted a pet raccoon since I saw this on TV in the '80s, and raccoons aren't even a thing in Europe :(
I learned about this 2 years ago when a racoon showed up in Tokyo close to where I lived. [1]
wild to think they spread even all the way to Japan because of anime. and probably south Korea now. They banned raccoons in Japan but it seems to not have caught up in SK and there are a lot of racoon pet videos from SK on YouTube)
A generation of us grew up deeply coveting a pet coon, and have never given up on that dream, really...
The shocker for me was the bit about Rascal learning not to wash his sugarcubes before eating (or actually, to rinse once, because he was OCD about washing his food). Not that itself, although fascinating and charming; the idea that sugar was rationed to the author's family was mindblowing to juvenile me.
Racoons are invading the north east of France:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2ijwZROb6g ; they are exotic invasive species: a female get 10 babies per year, and there is no predator
Then identify the "morph", the gene cluster, that did the trick in the initial species, to speed up the uplift for the rest of them.
But given how intelligent they are, and how much they learn in their short lifetimes, completely self-directed and self-learning highly curious autodidact geniuses from the moment they escape their tiny egg, a race of long lived octopuses without learning brakes might be an existential threat for us.
Or they might create a magical ocean civilization. There are octopus species everywhere. Deepest ocean floor, under the polar cap, even a "land" species that lives on the beach. Everywhere from sea level down.
Death follows mating for the males and the eggs hatching for the females. Not an uncommon behavior, all sorts of plants (ie agave) and animals (ie salmon) have a similar strategy.
Meaning the strategy works very well, and would likely be controlled by very different genes, depending on the species.
Changing this "death gene" via a breeding program is likely to fail, but could perhaps be accomplished via gene editing like CRISPR.
Another approach would be delaying sexual maturity. Doubling the lifespan to something like 4-5 years in the common octopus would have very interesting results.
However, doubling the lifespan would effectively halve the number of offspring, meaning these mutants would be less competitive, compared to their wild relatives.
This could be seen as the needed safeguard to prevent a race of highly intelligent mollusks from taking our planetary domination crown.
So all in all, delaying sexual maturity seems to be the better way to go for your project.
Yes, delayed reproduction would be the first step.
And simultaneously for post breeding longevity (however short that starts). Which can be done by post-selecting the young based on the phenotype of the parents. (No need for any harsh selection, simply choosing which young remain in the breeding pool, vs. which go there own way.)
Their short breeding cycles are a boon, since that allows for faster generations, and even small lifespan improvements would reflect significant change.
The high number of species is also a tremendous advantage.
All done at scale. Millions of octopus, across dozens of species, to efficiently select from as much existing genetic diversity as possible. Not just for faster gene clustering, but to gain different insights from different species that can be transferred, via CRISPR. As you noted.
And finally, also selecting for individual intelligence and social collaboration. They are unique in being an extremely socially intelligent animal, with high cross species cognitive understanding. There preference for solitude does not reflect any lack of social awareness. So this is one of the easier and potentially rewarding challenges.
Since effective intelligence in practice is a (literal) product of individuals and collaboration. There is tremendous opportunity for gain of function.
—-
Of course, I will need a vast underground laboratory under a tropical island for all this. A not-too-dormant volcano for cheap geothermal power. And a comfortably furnished submarine of my own design, for research forays, with a streamlined exterior inspired by the profile of a jetting octopus. Christened with an ominous name.
As for other resources? Well the ocean has infinite untapped resources, and I will soon have infinite assistants.
Ok, some of the latter might be me getting ahead of myself.
Family raised multiple raccoons over the years until wildlife rescue became more of a common thing you could call up. The garage was seemingly a hot spot for the occasional runt raccoon with closed eyes to be left behind.
They not only get bored they get very particular with who in the family they enjoy following. Which can cause even more havoc when someone gets upset the raccoon doesn't want to be around them. One particularly funny story was a customer's kid (Business was attached to the house) begged and cried to be let hold the raccoon. We all knew it was a bad idea but Grandpa caved to the customer's demands so the kid would shut up. The racoon gladly let me hand her over to the kid, crawled up on the kids shoulder and proceeded to shit from one shoulder to the other then immediately jump off and return to my shoulder to glare at the kid. Never again did we let anyone outside the family touch the raccoon until we gave her up to a local zoo for use in educational programs since she was fairly well trained to behave for treats.
Just make sure you know your state's laws and regulations very well. I had a friend in a mid-western state that was caring for a couple of babies when a tree fell and killed their mother. They were in contact with a licensed rescue to get them to them. The Dept. of Conservation caught wind and showed up at their house, took the animals, walked into their back yard with them and shot them on the spot.
Assuming you are starting with a wild raccoon, get one from a population that is not in the eastern parts of the US or Canada and rabies is unlikely.
Here in Washington state for example there have been no documented cases of rabies in any wild raccoon in at least 60 years. Same goes for all other wild terrestrial mammals here.
It's expensive but it isn't particularly bad to get.
I had a pretty low risk exposure to a bat this summer and decided to get it because it's so hard to be sure they didn't bite you. Wasn't a big deal, and I got quite a lot of the antibody injections in my finger...
Yes, I read an account by a zookeeper who had been potentially exposed to rabies due to the negligence of a vet. He had to get the rabies vaccine to be safe, which would have been painful enough if all had done well; but then he had a bad reaction to it and had to be hospitalized.
If you were talking about the rabies vaccine, for humans, that’s not really a normal vaccine for people to get. It’s not like getting the flu vaccine or the chickenpox vaccine or others, and they shouldn’t be lumped into that same category.
I'm currently 1 of 3 injections into getting a rabies vaccine and it's basically like every other vaccine I've had. A simple, painless, injection in the arm.
I got it the same time as my first shot of the Hep B vaccine too.
Oh I remember alright! I got bitten by a stray dog when I was 12 years old. I was given abdominal shots of the vaccine for several days. I can't remember if it was for 7 or 14 days, but it was a very painful and traumatic experience. It caused me to have a deep fear of dogs for several decades.
> post exposure vaccination is a thing?? does it work for everything
I believe in this discussion the context is specifically rabies.
> and why is it called vaccination not treatment?
It's both, really. You get a shot of rabies immunoglobulin (at the site of potential infection, i.e., bite) _and_ an extended course of vaccine at the same time.
Sometimes I I think people really underestimate the circumstances needed for domestication of a species to be successful. There's this conception of our human abilities as something that supersedes the way nature works and shape things the way we want, which might at least appear to be true in a lot of cases, but I don't think that domestication can work just because we happen to want it to.
The most coherent take I've read on it is that there actually needs to be an evolutionary advantage for the species in order for the domestication to work out, which means it's essentially something that needs to take place over generations. Raccoons being cute and fluffy might be a reason that we would like to have them around, but I think the larger question is whether there's a good enough reason for them to develop a lifestyle where they hang around indoors with humans. Putting it in terms of evolution also can help clarify why the personality characteristics you mention aren't a simple obstacle to overcome; the fact that they might be better off as a species in the long run if they could just immediately switch over to being a type of house pet like a cat or dog might not be enough if the path to that from where they are now requires significant "downward movement" from a local optimum in the short term for the adaptions start becoming more advantageous so that the can reach a higher optimum.
From what I remember spending time on this topic, raccoons need super challenging locks as toys and TONS of engagement from their keepers because they get bored easily and bored raccoons == ultra destructive raccoons. Also, rabies.