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Toronto
has a problem with raccoons. For years, the critters have been
overturning garbage cans and entering people’s homes to find food, and
they are good at it. Design a new garbage can lit, and the raccoons will
figure out a way to get in. In fact, research shows that raccoons that
live in a city are smarter than their woodland counterparts.
Suzanne
MacDonald, a comparative psychologist who studies raccoon behavior at
York University in Toronto, has compared the problem-solving skills of
rural and city raccoons. The result? Urbanites trump their country
cousins in both intelligence and ability. For the past few summers, she
videotaped rural and urban racoons toying with containers baited with
cat food. While both rural and city racoons readily approached familiar
containers, they dealt differently with unfamiliar ones. Where rural
raccoons took a long time to approach novel containers, city raccoons
would attack them the moment she turned her back.
One
particularly persistent urban raccoon even learned to open doors leading
into MacDonald’s garage, where she keeps her garbage bins. It stood up
on an overturned flowerpot, and kept pulling and pushing on the round
knob of the door handle with its five-digit paws until it turned.
“Normally, they can’t do that, they can’t grasp and turn things very
easily,” MacDonald says. “Raccoons in the city are extraordinary, not
only in their ability to approach things, but they have no fear, and
they stick with it, they will spend hours trying to get food out of
something.”
I dunno, is that intelligence or
desperation? It’s possible that rural raccoons may be less interested in
solving a difficult problem because they have other food sources that
are easier to deal with and they aren’t as hungry as a city raccoon
anyway. Nevertheless, the urban raccoon’s persistence results in
learning. And Toronto is having a hard time staying ahead of them. Read
about
the city’s effort to outsmart the urban raccoon at Nautilus.
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