Quote:

Human trash is 'kick-starting' the domestication of city-dwelling raccoons, study suggests Raccoons that live near humans had shorter snouts than rural raccoons, a trait that tends to arise in the early stages of domestication.

Other signs will be ears becoming floppy like in dogs and the development of white patches, at least that happened with cats and dogs, and with a guy who bred Arctic foxes until some were tame—and looked different to the original animals.


Quote:

City-dwelling raccoons are showing early signs of domestication, a new study finds. Using photos uploaded to the citizen science platform iNaturalist, researchers found that raccoons in urban environments had shorter snouts than their rural counterparts. The difference could be one of several traits that make up "domestication syndrome," the scientists wrote in a study published Oct. 2 in the journal Frontiers in Zoology. Domesticated animals typically become less aggressive toward humans over time. They gradually develop a relationship in which people provide for them in exchange for resources, such as meat and milk from livestock or labor from herding dogs. That process often involves selectively breeding animals for certain desirable traits, but it doesn't always begin that way.

https://www.livescience.com/animals/human-trash-is-kick-starting-the-domestication-of-city-dwelling-raccoons-study-suggests


Study quoted:

Quote:

Tracking domestication signals across populations of North American raccoons (Procyon lotor) via citizen science-driven image repositories Abstract North American raccoons are widespread across the contiguous United States and live in close proximity to humans (i.e. urban) and in rural environments. This makes them an excellent species for comparative work on the effects of human environments on phenotypic traits. We use raccoons as a mammalian model system to test whether exposure to human environments triggers a trait of the domestication syndrome. Our data suggests that urban environments produce reductions in snout length, which are consistent with the domestication syndrome phenotype. These results are crucial for the discussion of the validity of the Neural Crest Domestication Syndrome hypothesis. They also offer new opportunities to potentially observe early-stage domestication patterns in a yet non-domesticated mammalian species, without the possibility of introgression or hybridization with other already domesticated mammals. Background Domestication is often misunderstood as a purely human-driven “unnatural” process of artificial selection, a view that could not be more inaccurate [8]. The process of domestication across species starts with the adaptation of a subpopulation to a new environmental niche in the human environment [2, 11]. The combination of the ready availability of refuse, i.e., food scraps, and the absence of other large predators make the human environment a niche of great potential [47]. To best exploit this specific environment, animals would have to adapt to interference from humans: caution and care were necessary, but more importantly, only animals with dampened flight (or fight) responses would succeed best [35]. This makes the initial stages of the domestication process a process of pure natural selection. Only more recently did domesticated animals start to be subjected to selective, human-driven breeding that initially resulted in land races (i.e., animals with a specific purpose yet diverse looks), which eventually turned into what we now know as well-established pedigree breeding programs focused on morphological traits [28].

https://frontiersinzoology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12983-025-00583-1


WHY DON’T WE SEE POSTS LIKE THIS IN WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE ENVIRONMENT BOARD?

Probably because high school dropouts are incapable of it.