Ready for another round of “irl pokemon you want to bring home but probably shouldn’t?”
Today’s Moment of Science… the Tanuki.
Racoon dogs are from the canidae family and branched out on the evolutionary tree of life about 5.5 million years ago, which was plenty of time to evolve into a cuteness fluff nugget. Don’t be fooled by that adorable face or their designation in the canidae family; they’re about as closely related to Fido as they are to a coyote.
They’re even less related to the raccoon though; this is all convergent evolution gone mad.
Racoon dogs are adaptable, hungry buggers and not particularly picky eaters. Their food preference is ‘yes.’ Fruits, nuts, berries, and just about any animal they can manage to shove into their face hole- living or dead- is fair game. When food is scarce, they’re not above decayed flesh and shit eating. The only canid that hibernates, that outsized appetite helps them live off their fat reserves for a spell. Increasing their body fat levels by about 20-25% is absolutely necessary to survive the winter.
So go ahead, adorable little trash panda doge. Do what you gotta do to survive. Eat shit.
Steeped in Japanese folklore, there’s a delightful phenomenon of tanukis depicted in art with- and I cannot stress this enough- aggressively large testicles.
(Which I implore you to google for yourself, lest I get Zucked for posting cartoon tanuki balls).
Generally monogamous, their mating season lasts from February to April. After nine weeks a litter of 4-6 pups arrives and stays in their parents’ den for a month. The offspring generally reach sexual maturity by the following breeding season. Social critters, single tanukis are known to form a pack together until they find someone, and if you’re not picturing a group of racoon dogs getting smashed and bitching about dating on tinder we can’t be friends.
There are several known subspecies of the common raccoon dogs found throughout East Asia and most of Europe (stick a pin in that last one). There’s some debate as to whether the Japanese raccoon dogs are a separate species or a subspecies. Enough chromosomal differences have been identified to suggest that they can’t produce viable offspring, not that there have been any attempts. Designations as a species or subspecies by the types of organizations that decide these things are currently inconsistent.
So, the fur trade.
It’s not explicitly clear from the literature whether it was a government sanctioned program or some annoyingly ambitious fur traders, but in Soviet Russia, species invade you! Russians transported about 9,100 raccoon dogs over to the European side of the country and just goddamn let them out. Why? To “enrich the fauna with a valuable fur animal.” Oye. They were transplanted to seventy areas of the former USSR, and though they failed to thrive in cold and mountainous climates, they pretty much took over Europe.
They’re super fucking cute. That doesn’t preclude them from being a menace of an invasive species that’s eating everything, growing fast, and disrupting the ecosystem.
This of course leads to icky ethical conundrums like “how many adorable fuzzy critters is it okay to Thanos off for the greater good?”
They’re hunted throughout many countries for population control in an attempt to mitigate some of the impact they have on other local wildlife. The tactics and results are a mixed bag. In parts of Russia, they’re kept in check as tasty treats for the wolf population. It’s pretty well managed in Sweden where they tackled the issue goddamn exactly like you would have hoped they’d handle a deadly pandemic. Ahem. On the other hand, there are far more raccoon dogs born in Poland every year than humans.
Conversely, they’re still bred for fur in China. Per reporting from March of 2021, the conditions are exactly as beyond fucked as you’re probably imagining.
“But Mrs. Auntie SciBabe,” I hear you thinking real loud, “is there any good reason I can’t have one? I could save one of these pups from Latvia, surely!”
It’s true, they’re smart, curious, and typically not too aggressive in the wild. And technically, you can get a special permit to own one as a pet in the US. But tanukis really don’t dig humans all that much, and they’re classified as “injurious wildlife” because they’re so likely to fuck up the local ecosystem if a couple of them get out.
If you want a tanuki, go play Pokemon or Mario 3. If you absolutely need an animal that’s going to ignore you and fuck up some local animals, just get a cat.
This has been your Moment of Science, still telling people Buddy the Science Dog is a rare pokemon.
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