Raccoon Facts:
Their tails can make up 52% of their length, up to 405 mm.
Raccoons are extremely athletic they can climb with great
ease, are not bothered by a drop of 35 to 40 feet, and can run at speeds of up
to 15 miles per hour.
Raccoons are also very strong swimmers, although they are
often reluctant to enter the water because without waterproof fur, swimming
forces them to take on extra weight.
Raccoons have a highly developed tactile sense. Their
human-like forepaws (complete with 5 fingers) are used to pick up food with
their front paws before putting it in their mouth.
These animals can live up to 16 years in the wild, but most
don't make it past their second birthday. Did you know that a captive
raccoon was recorded living for 21 years. Yet, most Raccoons only live up to
two years.
A series of studies in the mid-to-late-twentieth century
show that a raccoon can remember solutions to tasks for up to 3 years.
Although there is a debate about intelligent Raccoon really
are. One group of behaviorists believes raccoons have high IQs and can deduce
and reason. While others rejected the idea and instead suggested the
animals relied on simpler "sensory thoughts" within the muscles.
The article below is about the original Raccoon study that
led to this divide.
How does intelligence of raccoons compare with other
species? That was a topic of heated debate between 1905 and 1915 within the
then-nascent field of comparative psychology.
In 1907, psychologist Lawrence W. Cole, who had established
a colony of raccoons at the University of Oklahoma, and Herbert Burnham Davis,
a doctoral student at Clark University, each published the results of nearly
identical experiments on the processes of learning, association and memory in
raccoons. They relied on E.L. Thorndike’s puzzle-box methodology, which
involved placing animals in wooden crates from which the animal had to escape
by opening the latch or sequence of latches. They observed the number of trials
required for successful completion and the extent to which the animal retained
the ability to solve the same problem more quickly when confronted again with
it. Using this method, they sought what Davis called “a tolerable basis” for
ranking the intelligence of raccoons on the phylogenetic scale of evolutionary
development. They independently concluded that raccoons bested the abilities of
cats and dogs, most closely approximating the mental attributes of monkeys.
Raccoons had attracted interest because they flourished,
rather than receded, in the face of human expansion. Over the centuries, people
had hunted raccoons for food and fur, decried them as agricultural pests and
urban bandits, and kept them as household pets. This latter role brought the
species to psychologists’ attention. Cole reported that he got the idea to work
with raccoons from observing the behavior of a pet raccoon kept at a local
market. At the time, most animal experiments being conducted occurred on the
borderlands of academic research, nature study and domestic life. Scientists
such as Charles Darwin, William James and James Mark Baldwin all developed
psychological theories based upon observations of their own children and pets.
Cole’s raccoons, for example, lived simultaneously as research objects and
amusing pets, a relationship that shaped how these experiments were presented
to and perceived by the public. Despite Davis’s protests, a widely printed
newspaper story depicted his puzzle-box experiments as an example of teaching
“tricks” to one’s pets.
Both popular and scientific naturalists had argued that
cunning, mischief and curiosity characterized the species. Davis and Cole
largely agreed with this assessment. The raccoon’s instinctual curiosity lay at
the heart of Cole’s most startling claim: that the animal possessed ideas
derived from complex forms of mental association, a quality that many
scientists argued non-human animals did not possess. Psychologists considered
curiosity a notable trait because it was a form of attention stripped of any
utilitarian motive such as hunger or fear. It represented learning in its
purest form. Cole claimed that his raccoons could, in certain instances, learn
how to solve a puzzle box simply by being “put through” the solution by the
experimenter. They did not simply rely upon the muscular associations built
through trial-and-error learning, as was the case with Thorndike’s cats.
Reporting on these experiments for McClure’s Magazine in 1909, E.T. Brewster
suggested that raccoons counted among those animals that at least “get into the
borderland that separates reasoning from other mental processes.” Review
articles by leading “genetic psychologists,” such as Herbert Spencer Jennings
and Robert Yerkes, suggested that that these raccoon experiments furnished some
of the best evidence that “free ideas” rather than simply ingrained experiences
may motivate the behavior of non-human animals.
Cole’s claims about raccoon intelligence drew ire from early
advocates of behaviorism, such as Walter S. Hunter. Raccoons featured
prominently in his celebrated delayed-reaction experiments, first published as
his 1913 dissertation. One of the most truly comparative studies of the era,
his research subjected 22 rats, two dogs, four raccoons and five human children
to the same experiment. Hunter first trained the subject to associate a light
source with the positive experience of being fed. Next, he detained the subject
behind a gate, but permitted it to observe three light bulbs, one of which was
briefly illuminated and then turned off. The task was to remember the position
of the lighted bulb and to approach it and collect the food reward. Hunter defined
success in terms of the subject’s repeated correct approach to the stimulus. He
manipulated the duration of the delay before release to assess how long a
subject could remember the location of the previously lighted bulb. He
concluded that the same forms of learning governed rats, dogs and raccoons and
found little evidence of mental images. He did report one telling difference:
The rats and dogs needed to constantly maintain their bodily orientation toward
the lightbulb during the period in which it was off in order to correctly
identify it, but the raccoons moved about during the delay. Like the human
children, raccoons could identify the correct stimulus even after being
distracted.
These results were still not enough to convince Hunter that
raccoons possessed human-like reasoning. Hunter accused Cole of
anthropomorphism and gullibility when it came to interpreting animal behavior.
Cole fired back that Hunter and his students lacked the skills necessary for
handling a semi-wild species, preferring instead “toothless” domesticated
animals.
Criticisms by Hunter and others gradually pushed raccoons
out of the purview of psychologists’ research. Since the 1910s, raccoons have
had a few but scattered advocates among psychologists. After 1915, few studies about
raccoons appeared in psychology journals. Like many of their generation, Davis
and Cole moved from comparative psychology to the field of education. Hunter
conducted a few experiments on raccoons over his long career but continued to
downplay species-specific traits. With the renewed interest in comparative
cognition, perhaps it is time to reconsider the raccoon’s exclusion from the
discipline of psychology.
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