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This is the Jeff Corwin message board on Animal Planet's website. I stop by there every so often and I happened to see a "Found a raccoon" post. It's from a girl (still in school apparently) who found a baby raccoon and is attempting to keep it. There's too much in the post for me to recap it all here...this is rediculous!

By the way, I'm jrh312 on that forum...please feel free to contribute, I want to see this thing make it.

Sorry, I am having issues loading the pages...slow connection in the middle of the country works great being in the middle of nowhere for soft releases, doesn't do a darn thing for my internet connection though.

You are welcome to point the person back this way and we can try and help her here, but above all I encourage her to get the animal to a facility that has experience. Raccoons bond far too easily to be reared by someone without experience/resources. Sorry, you will likely hear me saying things like that alot this spring/summer.

Joker
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That's what we've been telling her for the past week or so... but she quit responding. I know rehab centers are generally not well-publicized because of funding, so I told her that if she could at least tell me what state she's in, I could give her a list of rehabbers for that area. I'm still waiting (and have been since the first day) to hear this information.

Sorry to say, it's not looking good.

Sorry that you don't have better news. As we all know, raccoons are strange creatures....they are the most forgiving developmentally speaking as it pertains to rehabbing orphans, yet they are also the most dangerous zoonoses wise. Hopefully if she isn't providing it the aid it needs, it is well enough to take care of itself.

On a side note, last fall I was asked to take in a rather cranky coonlet that appeared to be 8 wks or so old, bottle ready one would think, and then ready for conversion to solids. The little beast fought the bottle tooth and nail, growling and lunging the entire time, so I offered it some weaning mush, ate that right up. Still hated me with a passion, so after about 2 weeks of neither of us knowing which was more scared, I figured what the heck...lets see....

Took the bugger outside and set her in the grass, and she rushed over to the nearest tree and scaled it like she had been doing it forever, then took off from there to live her life. I am quite certain that she was considerably older than she appeared, since an 8 wk old coons coordination wouldn't permit a straight line walk, much less a 2 story tree climb...explains though why she was so miffed about the bottle!
Live and learn...

Joker
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