this is how we are ‘disneyfying’ the countryside

It’s best not to beat around the bush: in some parts of the US, raccoons have become a damn hell. The demographic boom in urban areas, the constant invasion of properties, aggressive behavior and the risk of diseases have generated an endless number of problematic situations.

In fact, the enormous availability of food from human waste is turning every situation into a problem.

And yet, at the same time, we are seeing a curious phenomenon: raccoons are in the process of domestication.

Domestication? It seems so. A recent study has evaluated 20,000 photographs of urban and rural raccoons and what they have found is “a clear reduction in snout length.” It is about, as Nardine Saad explains on the BBC, of ​​”a physical change consistent with the early stages of domestication seen in cats and dogs.”

It is not the only sign of domestication: according to Artem Apostolov, principal investigator of the work, “attenuated flight (or fight) responses are found” and the animals seem to feel more comfortable around us.

Why is this happening? According to Raffaela Leschco-author of the study, “garbage is really the driving force behind all of this.” “Everywhere we humans go, there is trash, and animals love our trash,” said in Scientific American. But the truth is that it is not easy to access that garbage.

You need to be bold enough to rummage through the bins, but not enough to pose a threat. And that evolutionary pressure tends to select genetic lines with good behavior.

Good behavior and more. For years, scientists have associated domestication with very specific anatomical and morphological changes such as curled tails, droopy ears, depigmentation, smaller brains and reduced facial skeletons. It is something we can easily see if we buy a dog and a wolf.

What we are seeing with the raccoon case is that the active domestication hypothesis (the fact that humans captured and domesticated the animals) does not fit well with these data. “The process could actually begin much earlier than previously thought — these authors maintain — especially as the animals became accustomed to human environments.”

That is, we believed that we were domesticating the world and, in reality, it was the world that was domesticating us.

Image | Joshua J Cotten

In Xataka | Neither hunting nor company: we domesticated the dog because we had plenty of meat in the Ice Age