Michael Pettit

I have almost never written about kind of the dominant people in the field. I personally find myself attracted to the misfits.

I woke up one morning and, of course, the compost is all over the deck. I'm scooping it up because the raccoons could very easily get into the walk. And as a student of psychology, I asked myself, huh, I wonder if anyone ever used a puzzle box with raccoons. They seem really good at it.

These raccoons seem very adept at doing locks, and so I was just curious.

You know, they aren't primates. but they're also not rodents. So there's something about them that they sort of take on this role as kind of this intermediary species. There's this reputation of the raccoon for being this cunning, intelligent trickster.

They're their own thing. They in some ways seem to be above the rodents and maybe even our carnivores.

So Lawrence Cole, in a lot of ways, is a nobody. He's not someone, if you go to a history of psychology textbook and pull it off the shelf, he's not someone that's particularly remarkable.

Darwin absolutely says it's not just our kind of our physical form as human beings that is continuous with natural selection, but also our psychological selves.

Through a series of circumstances, he acquires a small colony of raccoons.

As far as Cole knew, no one had kind of put raccoons through these motions. So that's... a doctoral dissertation, I can run these studies with these raccoons, right? Whatever the data is, I can say I have added to our knowledge of comparative psychology. He probably had a hunch that this was going to be interesting.

I don't know if raccoons are the most charismatic of our fauna, but raccoons, they're kind of fun. I think they're the most charismatic of our fauna. Well, they're annoying, but they're lovable scamps, right?

One of the problems with raccoons is they are a much larger and more cumbersome species than your bred lab rats, right? In terms of feeding, caging, maintenance, Rats proved much more docile and adept. And again, if you want to have decent numbers for your study, right, they also reproduce quite readily. They have very short breeding cycles, and you can kind of build up the populations.

They were animals that you could control.