I’m too old to be chasing alligators; come to Florida for your next vacation and take a few home with you. We’ve got plenty and won’t miss them.
I first saw Florida in 1966; I came here to accept a job in Fort Myers. Back then, Lee County was still pretty much the real Florida and real Florida crackers were still to be found. I even found a few who thought raccoons were delicious. So there’s your answer; kill 'em and eat 'em.
Uh, QtM, you don’t do anything like perform circumcisions, do you? ‘Cause I’m thinkin’ I don’t wanna know what you do with those “leftovers.” :eek:
Musicat, I’m sure you mean well. But listen: the raccoons don’t need you. They can feed themselves. If you really want to feed them from your own hands so you can look into their beady little scavenger eyes, then make the commitment to build some kind of enclosure where you can keep them for the rest of their lives. The alternative is to leave them alone and let them be wild animals.
As it is, all you’re doing is taming them just enough to get them killed. If you keep doing it, it’ll be out of willful stupidity.
I’m a conservatrive, gun-owning, kill-it-and-grill-it kinda guy, and I’m in pretty total agreement with you vis-a-vis Musicat.
Musicat: mankind’s burgeoning population coupled with (sub)urban sprawl has encroached more and more into the habitats of wild animals. This isn’t in-and-of-itself a bad thing, as long as you remember that they are wild animals, and making them dependent upon humans for food only leads to more cute and beutiful critters getting squished underneath autombile tires, or having their internal organs explode from their bodily orifices due to the rapid transfer of kinetic energy in the form of blunt force trauma as the grill of your car/truck impacts them, all because they’re hanging around human habitat looking for a free lunch.
And, as Beaucarnea has pointed out, several species who would otherwise be thriving are being wiped out due to mankind’s destruction of their natural habitat. That isn’t “natural selection” at work; it isn’t “The Circle of Life.”
So, her call to try to help endangered species isn’t a selfish value judgement about what deserves to live, and what doesn’t. It’s a responsible recognition that we humans can and do have (sometimes wholly unintended) negative impacts on natural habitats, and that it is also our responsibility to try to preserve and restore these mankind-destroyed habitats so that entire species aren’t wiped from the face of the earth in order to support our Better Homes & Gardens.
I’m waiting for the pit thread that goes like this:
"My neighbor keeps feeding the neighborhood raccoons. I’ve tried to get her to stop, but she insists it’s her ‘right.’ But the damn things keep getting in my trash (yes, I latch it tightly). They tear up my my patio. They burrow under my house. They terrorize my children, looking for handouts. My children! for og’s sake! I know I live in a rural area and wildlife is part of the charm, but these little vermin are possibly rabid. And they’re near my children. My babies!!!
So I got my husband to get his .22 and shoot the little masked fuckers. That’ll teach them to get near my kids. Maybe I should leave their bodies where my neighbor can find them."
Whatever else you guys do, please don’t decorate roadkill raccoons.
Nope, sorry, this is the first reason FOR feeding raccoons I have seen. 
Nah, she’s a good boss. Your Boss May Vary.
Musicat, so you’re not worried about rabies. You think it’s rare in your area. Would another really horrible disease carried by raccons convince you?
Raccoons can harbor some really bad zoonotic parasites like
Baylisascaris
or
or
So people are not discouraging you from feeding raccoons because we’re big meanies. It is really a bad idea for humans and the animals. Aside from potential disease exposure or injury to humans, causing wild animals to lose their fear of humans is also dangerous to the animal. Wild animals should be observed but not interfered with.
Good grief! I spend my working life caring for sick, injured and orphaned wild animals, so I hope that my ‘caring credentials’ are beyond question. But I am also a biologist, and I recognize that my work must remain within biological realities. I certainly do not hate raccoons. They are bright, adaptable, fascinating critters. The memory of my first orphaned litter still warms the cockles of my flinty old heart. And over the years I’ve been able to put quite a few of them back into appropriate native habitats. But…
Raccoons are one of the few species whose populations actually rise (rather than decline) in close contact with humans. Even accidental feeding (garbage and road kill) causes their populations to grow beyond the levels of a normal, balanced ecosystem. Deliberate feeding drives this population increase even further.
Note that raccoons are not simply scavengers, but are opportunistic predators. When their population is artificially expanded, populations of prey species (meaning almost anything smaller than a raccoon) are diminished. This has a significant negative impact, not just on those prey species, but on competing predators as well. So there will be fewer mice, rats, voles, nesting birds, snakes, frogs, etc. as well as fewer hawks, owls, skunks, foxes, etc. This is certainly not a service to the ecosystem as a whole.
Neither is it a service to the raccoons. In these artificially maintained populations, diseases and parasites are rampant, tansmitted from one raccoon to another far more frequently than at normal population densities. (Think: one flu carrier on a crowded airplane.) The animals are continually physically stressed, and their stress grows as the population increases.
Physical stress also occurs from ingestion of contaminated foodstuffs. I don’t know about other people’s garbage, but mine contains food scraps along with lots of things that are hardly food. Think discarded medicines, household cleansers (or the rags and sponges used with them), household pesticides, and lots more that I would never deliberately feed to an animal but that a garbage-foraging coon will find along with my apple cores.
They are also psychologically stressed by over-crowding. Their intra- and inter-specific behaviors are warped, and become even more abberant as the population grows, becomes more and more dense, wild resources diminish, and the coons become ever more dependant upon human food sources. These animals have almost zero ability to ‘revert’ or to survive in the absence of human supplementation. Their whole behavioral system, a lifetime of habits, mitigates against it.
Musicat, your attitude toward this amazes me. “What happens if I move or die? Either someone else will take over, or the population of some animals will adjust.” So after you admittedly create a problem, in your absence they can just go to hell? Well most of them *won’t * go to hell. They *will * go to your neighbors. At least short term. They will perforce continue the behaviors you have so well taught them. While your neighbors may tolerate a few raccoons straying from your feeding stations, I doubt they will remain as sanguine when the entire gang descends on their yards. Somebody (more likely several some-bodys), in the name of human safety or the safety of their domestic animals, is gonna get out their guns, their traps, or their bowls of antifreeze.
None of this is a service to the people involved, their pets and livestock, the native ecosystem, or the raccoons themselves.
One way or the other though, the balance will eventually be restored. Raccoons will once again be relatively rare high order predators in a balanced ecosystem. Too bad all the ones you so loved won’t be among them.
Damn good post, CannyDan.
Best damn post I’ve read all month.
So… can I still throw the occasional carrot up on the hillside behind our patio for the bunnies? 'Cause if I can’t they’re gonna be pissed!
Only after counting to 3.
What no love for my scary zoonotic diseases? sigh No one appreciates a good zoonosis anymore.
They scare the holy crap out of me, along with half a dozen others transmitted by raccoons. We take *serious * precautions here. But I’ve learned over the years that many people are perfectly willing to overlook such potential nightmares to rationalize their own selfish desire to play ‘all mother’ to living things. So I usually only offer them as secondary reasons to discourage feeding raccoons. I didn’t mention them (or rabies) again, as you had already done so.
BTW-- Florida administrative code has long prohibited the deliberate feeding of alligators. Recently the code was amended to prohibit deliberate feeding of bears, sandhill cranes, and raccoons (for different reasons). Florida code also prohibits the trapping and relocation of any wildlife without a specific permit. So trapping and relocating problematic raccoons is, shall we say, rare.
(Thanks to those who made kind comments.)
Place went to hell with the demise if Travis McGee. 
Pretty well limits one to shooting them. May animal rehabilitators obtain permits?
Some children are cute, too. So do you (not you personally, Qadgop, but generic “you” addressed to people who feed wild animals) go up to strangers’ children and offer them food?