Racoons go from pets to crop-devouring pests in Tokyo as numbers surge

Anime lovers raced to buy racoons as pets in the 1970s.

A rapidly rising population of racoons – originally brought to Japan as pets -are causing havoc in Tokyo and beyond.

The invasive animal is causing widespread damage to crops across the country, with the more rural parts of the capital city being particularly affected.

In the financial year of 2012, authorities trapped 259 racoons. Just 10 years later, that figure rose to 1,282, reports Kyodo News.

The damage caused to crops in 2022 came to 450 million yen (£2,200,000 million), with fruit, vegetables and livestock impacted, according to the farm ministry.

Racoons are native to North America but were introduced to Japan as pets in the late 1970s thanks to the popularity of the anime, Rascal the Racoon.

It was based on an autobiographical novel by Sterling North called Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era. In it, North writes about raising a baby racoon, Rascal.

At one point more than 1,500 racoons were being imported to Japan each year, Smithsonian Magazine reported.

The Japanese government soon banned their importation and keeping them as pets, but by then it was too late.

Many owners soon realised racoons are not easy pets, with a tendency to bite and cause mayhem at home and released them into the wild, while some escaped on their own.

With no natural predator in Japan, their numbers grew quickly and today can be found in all of the country’s 47 prefectures, the Tokyo-based news agency Kyodo News reported.

Local councils in Tokyo have set up traps to curb the numbers but the measures have proved ineffective.

‘Our traps are sometimes broken as raccoons are also desperate to live. Only a fraction is actually caught, so we are unable to grasp their overall range,’ an official from one municipality.

Another country struggling to cope with invasive racoons is Germany after the animal was introduced for its fur in the 1930s.

Last year there were several reports of racoons behaving badly across the country by breaking into people’s homes and gardens, killing pet rabbits and even getting drunk on beer.

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