Okay, to answer a couple of your questions: 1. Domesticating raccoons: It has been done, but I think it’s like having a pet gangster. 2. Skunks: “Skunk” is a Native American name for this North American species of a member of the weasel family that occurs on several continents. They secrete some horrible potion from glands in their butts when they feel threatened. And they spray it with force, so you don’t just smell it - you get covered in it. And it’s nice and oily so you can’t easily get rid of it. Not a lot of people are dumb enough to get “skunked” twice. As for the smell, it’s not like poop. It’s more like tear gas. A direct hit from an adult skunk can make you choke, your eyes water - it’s strong stuff. Fortunately, they’re mostly nocturnal, so you have to go to some effort to cross paths with one. We had a skunk living under the front porch of our house once, and it was fine most of the time. We were active in the day, it was active at night. It was only an issue if it got into a fight with another nocturnal animal. Then the skunk fumes were strong enough to wake me out of a sound sleep - on the second floor of the house. 3. Virginia Opossum: Our Friend, the Opossum, is beloved among all right-thinking people in the USA. They are the very definition of “ugly-cute.” They are North America’s only marsupial. They are inoffensive and shy and adorable in behavior if not in looks. They are about the size of a cat, snack on deer ticks, are almost completely immune to rabies, carry their babies on their backs like a mommy-bus, have prehensile tails and forepaws like little hands, and are so sensitive to stress that they literally pass out when frightened, falling into a 10-minute coma at the drop of a hat. It is a sign of good character (imo) to love opossums, and protect and respect them.
🤣 "...like having a pet gangster." Just about fell out of my chair over this one, LOL! And you are, of course, so very right about this. They're cute, but they're far too clever, and far too destructive without intending any malice. And many of them do carry rabies. I love opossums, and I have to disagree that they are "ugly-cute:" I think those faces are as cute as can be. We have one in the neighborhood who shows up from time to time to snag some of the food we put out for the outside cats. If it finds cat food, it eats it and if it doesn't, like last night, it gets itself a drink of water from a big water dish we also keep out for kitties, and it does it without dumping a lot of shrub or tree detritus or even just mud from its paws into the water. Very mannerly! And then it goes on its way. As for respecting them, they may be shy but when pushed to it they know how to use every single one of their 50 (fifty) teeth. And they will---if you leave them no exit and therefore no choice, but I'm sure you're aware of all this. Delighted to meet another opossum lover!
I will add that we don't call them Opossums, but Possums and I have to disagree with you on their cuteness factor. The only thing scarier than walking into your yard late at night and being met with those devil like, glow in the dark eyeballs, is to actually get a look at the creature behind them. They may be beneficial to the environment, but cute they are not.
@@dmpvip I'm not sure if you're addressing this to me, but it seems that you are, so I'm responding. Original commenter *jenfries6417* opined that opossums (that's the real, official name, so using the "O" at the beginning of the word isn't wrong, and since she did, I did, too at least in part to avoid this) are, and I quote, "...the very definition of ugly-cute." Now, we have three opinions expressed: hers, which is "ugly-cute;" mine, which is that their faces are "...cute as can be," and yours, which is that 'possums have "...devil like, glow in the dark eyeballs, ... [and that the creature behind them" well, you didn't say explicitly, only that you don't find them cute. Just for the record, I have come home after full dark, and surprised a 'possum who was dining at the outdoor cats' food dish on the back porch; it abandoned the food, and slipped around past a five-gallon lidded bucket of pasteurized, pelletized poultry manure, and just waited in the darkness (house and I were new to each other at the time, didn't have a back porch light installed then) for me to go indoors. But I could still see its light-colored hindquarters and its tail, so I spoke to it and it dropped over the side of the porch, and disappeared into the neighbor's hedge. Had some 'possum encounters in recent years, too. Always relaxed and rather shy and not looking for trouble. I'm not looking for trouble here, either, but, again just for the record, I'm no more likely to change my mind about 'possums than you are to change yours.
Fun fact from an older (57 years old) American. Benjamin Franklin wanted our National Symbol to be a turkey. The exact bird we eat at our national holiday of Thanksgiving. Crazy. Opossums are not very attractive and fierce looking, but are actually very beneficial animals. They eat ticks and many other pests and don't carry rabies. Unlike raccoons. Respect and love opossums.
Funner fact, he did not. IIRC Franklin just penned a funny letter to his daughter about the nobility of the turkey and how it should be the national bird over the lazy bald eagle. He did it for a laugh. People confuse the private letter for something more all the time. When he was on the first committee to decided the national seal, he voted for no bird. Subsequent committees decided on using the bald eagle, sealing it as the national bird. So the most we can say is that Franklin wanted no birds at all.
Skunks don't smell like poop. It is a musk smell. If you have a dog that has been freshly sprayed by a skunk, it is so strong it is like tear gas. It so strong it burns your eyes, makes them water.
@@KuniiMatsuno, you can say it smells like weed. If they live somewhere where it is legal they will absolutely know the smell lol it can be hard to determine the difference if you live somewhere with an abundance of both!
Many people do this, not just for skunks, but also for other members of the weasel family. Although skunks are the most pungent. Although when my mother was a child, she had a skunk as a pet, and it was not descented.
I once lived where a neighbor fed a couple feral cats. I got a laser pointer to play with them from my 2nd story landing. They had no interest in it. There was a skunk and raccoon however, that both enjoyed chasing after the red dot 😂 later discovered some fish would also try to chase after it!
That's right about having a skunk's scent glands removed. Si you can have them as pets. My best friend down the street, in 2nd grade, had a pet skunk. It was usually hiding behind the stove during day. So we seldom saw it. But you'd smell them on drives in the country cuz they'd get hit by a car. And you could smell them for a long way. You never forget that smell. There's nothing I know you can compare that smell to. But NOT poop! But bad! Opossums are the only baby animals that aren't cute. And they don't get cuter as adults. They have a weird rat-like tail they can hang from tree limbs.
A groundhog is like a hamster only if your hamsters are two feet long. It's actually a large ground squirrel. The smell of a skunk is so strong that I passed over a dead one in my car once, and my car smelled of it for a week. Raccoons are very intelligent and have hands. The US didn't get native monkeys but raccoons sort of fill that nuisance roll in our ecosystem.
Skunks smell isn't their natural state, it's their defense. They can spray some very foul smelling stuff when they feel threatened and you can smell it from a very long way away. If you're out driving in the country or even sometimes the city you will know if a skunk has sprayed at some point within a couple hundred meters if you smell it. I've been pretty close to them before and never been sprayed, the key is not to panic if you see one, you don't want to surprise it. If you're sprayed you have to take a bath in tomato juice or you're going to smell horrible for weeks.
There is a bald eagle named Murphy at a sanctuary in Missouri that can't fly because of an injury when he was younger and in 2023 he built a nest and started trying to incubate a rock during the breeding season since he doesn't have a mate. He even had to be put in a separate enclosure due too him chasing away other eagles protectively, the sanctuary got word of an eaglet-(baby eagle) that fell out of a nest and needed a home do they decided to try and see if Murphy would adopt this eaglet and sure enough he did. He raised him till he was old enough to be released back into the wild and they funnily enough named that eagle Rocky. And now Murphy is raising another eaglet that was found orphaned.
For fans of Warner Brothers cartoons, real roadrunners are only the size of a large crow, or small raven, and they can fly well, so coyotes are no real threat to them.
I have one that hangs around, it isn't bothered that I'm out at night or just walks around me and continues on it's way, I've followed it around too, very chill
@@m2hmghbSome like a trapped possum. The house where I grew up had a large back porch on a concrete slab. A family of possums once took up residence under the slab. My dog, a wire haired terrier mix, loved to go under the slab and into their den, treating all of us on the other side of the slab to quite an array of snarling, screaming and scuffling, and then she would emerge with bright eyes, bloody face and wagging tail, ready to do it all over again in a couple of days.
Andre, we also have bears,wolves, and alligators. We also have rattlesnakes and copperhead snakes. That is why 6 year olds in the country used to get their first rifle.
In the 1960s due to hunting and pesticides damaging bird eggs, the bald eagle was almost extinct in the USA, you could only see it on the remote coasts and around national parks out west. Even in the 90s it was very very rare to see it in the majority of the States. But the today the population has made a huge recovery. I've even seen them around lakes here in Indiana. I think at its lowest point there were maybe 800 left, and now there are over 300,000 in the United States.
Fun fact: one of those pesticides was called DDT. Very strong stuff, but it caused the eagle’s eggs to have a thin shell that was almost guaranteed to break. But it was also the only pesticide that works on bedbugs. The ban on DDT caused the bedbug population to explode. So the thin shells of eagle eggs led to our current bedbug infestation.
I've seen thousands of racoons, and I think most Americans would say the same thing. They're cute, but they are WILD animals! They are also very destructive. In one place I lived they got into our attic from the outside. It took us weeks to get them out. They can be very fierce, and if they attack a person, they can do a lot of damage. They are also rabies carriers. I have never been deliberately mean to a racoon, but I would never try to make friends with one. Groundhogs look like hamsters, but they're about 100 time bigger. I've been skunked. It's like being tear-gassed! Seriously, I ended up vomiting uncontrolably. It doesn't smell anything like "poop." Possums are wonderful! They kill pests like ticks, and they don't carry rabies. Yea Possums! I live in the middle of Providence, Rhode Island, and my yard overlooks a graveyard. We see coyotes in there all the time.
I have to technically say that they are called Opossums. Possums are in Australia. I have some family that live there and they have corrected me also 😂
@@SherriLyle80s I don't doubt it, and the possums in Australia are probably different animals. But herre in New England everybody calls opossums "possums", and I believe the same is true down south. It's not something that I think will change any time soon.
@@christopherstephenjenksbsg4944yep, the possums are possums down South as well (at least in Arkansas). They told me so. Then they hissed at me and told me I’d smoked enough for the night, and I should go inside and stop talking to possums. 😁
We have Opossums put up residents in our yard off and on. Love having them, not only do they eat the bugs and snails (that eat up my flowers and garden) but they also keep the rats away which is a huge bonus.
Let me tell you all about "domesticated" racoons: the answer is no. I was at a house party once with a bunch of hippies and punk rock people. We're standing on the front lawn, drinking and having a good time, when a hippy comes up to the party with his pet racoon. Naturally, all the hippies and punks say, "aw man, that's a cool pet! What a cute racoon!" and they pet it, and he goes in the house to get a beer. Going inside, the racoon does the first thing you would expect a racoon to do: it finds the bathroom and immediately tips over the trashcan looking for anything to eat. Then it wanders into the kitchen and knocks that trashcan over too. They're great pets if you're homeless. Not so much if you have a house with standing trashcans lol.
A person I worked with several years ago knew someone with a raccoon. This person, their spouse and young child petted the raccoon. A week or so later, the raccoon went rabid. All of the mentioned people had to get rabies shots.
Wiley E Coyote Looney Tunes cartoons: The bird also exists. It is called a greater roadrunner, while not actually blue, it is a lovely bird. Spoiler, They don't eat seeds either, They eat things like insects and lizards etc. I live in the Mojave desert and see them regularly. I love them.
Also, the ones we saw when we lived in New Mexico were only about as tall as a mid-calf sock - having grown up in the midwest, I was DEFINITELY surprised!
Opossums aren't mice. They are Marsupials (pouches they raise their young in) and they are about the size of a small dog. They look way scarier then they are.
This is your advanced English lesson for today. You must say it as fast as possible. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? As much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
I live in upstate New York. We’ve had both raccoons and opossums on our porch. South of us there used to be an Army Depot. The grounds were fenced off and deer were trapped inside. Because there was no hunting, when a totally white deer was born, it lived to maturity and bred. We ended up with a population of white deer. Since the depot was decommissioned, parts of the fence have been removed and white deer are now scattered across the area. I guess that one animal native to the US that Louis didn’t mention is the wild turkey. I have had to stop twice to let a flock of wild turkeys cross the road. We even had one in our yard. Bald Eagles were reintroduced into our area several decades ago and now we have a number of them locally.
With as crazy as they look opossums are key to the environment. They are the size of a cat, they're the only marsupial outside of Australia and New Zealand, they eat ticks and other bad insects, and they're not able to get rabies. So all in all a pretty cool animal.
@@MadMurdoc86 not mean, just absolutey terrified of you. All they can do is hiss, play dead, and make a stinky - I've literally put my hand inside a hissing possum's mouth and she did nothing. I've never even heard of someone being bitten, though I suppose it's possible.
These are incredibly common animals in the U.S., I literally saw half of this list today when going out for breakfast. I have a raccoon living in my barn, and groundhogs all over the back of the property. White tail deer cut through my property every morning (usually about 15 of them). Possums (Opussum, both spellings are acceptable, just a regional difference) are all over the area too. Only saw a roadkilled one today, but they are a frequent sight. And the Bald Eagle, which is a rare sight in my area, I've only seen about a dozen of them over the years in the wild, but one flew right in front of my car this morning. If I can find my SD card reader, I think I caught it on dashcam, it was really close, so I want that video saved. No mule deer in my area. And while we do have coyotes here, I haven't seen any for a couple of weeks now. Same with skunks, they're around, but mostly nocturnal, so I rarely see them, but you can smell when they're nearby. Skunks smell very bad. I hit one with my car once, it took two weeks of going to the car wash daily to get the smell off it.
Where ARE you?!!! Of course I just wonder region. but Wow. We get a bunch of the critters here, occasional hawk. Residential neighborhood in NE, mostly small houses on small lots, some small apt buildings here and there. When I first lived here some wild turkeys would be walking around too. I came from a bigger city sometimes living places with bigger lots but also even tighter than here. So I knew some critters but didn't know what the heck THAT was! 😂 Oh I saw a chicken once just walking down the sidewalk but my guess is he escaped from somebody's yard. I'd also been drinking and hadn't lived here long so I was like WHAT is happening HERE? Because if you saw a picture of my streets, you would not expect anybody having chickens or such a variety of everything I was seeing roaming around! 😂
@bonnyj931 Sure....If you aren't maintaining your property. Because, if you are, you would be aware of the issue when it was a small problem and prevent it from becoming a big one.
Recently discovered, in person, that groundhogs are also quite adept at climbing kudzu vines. So, think of them as monkey-beavers, without the flat leathery tail. They can sometimes even be mistaken for a really fat otter.
As a railroader, my run was out in the country. 250 miles, most of it out in the middle of nowhere? The wildlife was spectacular. The peace and solitude was unmatched. I routinely saw bald eagles, deer, possums, raccoons, everything you could possibly imagine? 24/7. That was the best part of my job. Being able to look up in the sky with no lights, and see the Milky Way, watching sunrise and sunsets in all their glory with no light pollution. It was breathtaking at times? I retired July 4th. 30 years. Will never experience that again. It was SO cool? Got stopped onetime, next to a bunch of trees, night time, and hundreds of thousands of lightning bugs were in the trees? It was surreal. Coolest thing I've ever seen.
Dude! BNSF engineer Retire 4th of Aug 30 years I can confirm your comments I chased the money my whole career Missouri Texas Oklahoma Illinois Iowa Seattle Canada My engineer seniority traveled with me as long as it was a BN yard. The amount of wildlife we see as an occupation other than a zoo keeper is hard to match Safe travels brother
@@craigellis8354 Engineer for UP. Be careful my brother? You will miss the people. You will miss your job. You will NOT miss the company? It is mindblowing. It is difficult to get used to after 30 years. There is a place in North Platte Ne. called Donna's Office Service that can help deal with all the paperwork invovled for retirement. There are only two companies in the U.S. that offer this. I highly reccomend it. Her name is Julie, Donna was her mom. Julie said she gets railroaders from all over the U.S. that do business with her. RRB was virtually no help, after looking at everything, to me. The other guy that offers this is in Oregon, I think. Just a couple hundred bucks. Well worth it. Maybe save you money you might miss on your own? She does all the paperwork. Once you sign everything, there is no going back to "undo" or "redo" it. It's good to have a professional doing it all for you. Good Luck and God Bless.
@@craigellis8354 My comments keep getting deleted? Donnas Office Supply in North Platte Ne can help you with retirement paperwork. Highly reccomended from RR all across the US.
@@craigellis8354 Look into Donnas Office Supply In North Platte Ne for help on retirement stuff? Well worth it. Only 2 companies in the us that offer this?
My son has four raccoons that people dumped him with when they decided to be irresponsible. They are house pets but very very active. Vets will not even see them and put them down right away due to rabies fears. We live in Montana and keep telling people to leave the babies in the wild. They are spoiled and loved now but should have been left in the wild. Love your channel.
Yes skunk is that bad . The spray is self defense and if your pet gets sprayed it can make them and you physically ill. The smell is also incredibly difficult to get off.
Skunks have two very different smells. If your dog gets skunked, you need to de-skunk it immediately. If you are driving and smell a skunk, it’s completely different - I was in my 30s before I realized that dead skunk smells like pot smoke (I don’t toke, so didn’t make the connection).
People have tried domesticating raccoons, but they tend to be destructive when they're kept indoors. I remember reading an article about scientists who wanted to use raccoons as test subjects because of their intelligence. They had to abandon the study because the raccoons kept breaking out of their cages and making a shambles of the lab.
I've seen a family of raccoons pick a lock.I've seen them on tie bags. They will even send out a decoy... So you Focus on the decoy while they steal your food. Seen it myself.
Coyotes are infamous for using the bait tactic on people's pet dogs. They get the dog to chase them or simply follow an attack them with the whole pack. I hear the coyotes often at night in the distance barking and howling which is kinda mixed together so I call it harking lol but anyway that usually means they are running another animal down or have actually done so.
Andre, you're not dumb and you're not ignorant! You're just in the process of learning and we don't expect you to know everything right away. It's kind of funny though when you asked if any of us have ever seen raccoons because they are incredibly common! I live in Massachusetts and you don't really see them too often because they are nocturnal, but every once in a while you catch a glimpse of them and they definitely make themselves known by doing things like sorting through trash. Skunks, deer, and coyotes are common here as well. By the way, I noticed that you smiled when you mentioned Laurence's cat. You've mentioned also having a cat. I think you should bring your cat on sometime! People love cats! I guarantee that a video featuring your cat would put a lot of smiles on a lot of peoples faces! Maybe you can at least tell us its name?
I love that he mentioned Coeur D'Alene Idaho. I've lived in that area my entire life, it's beautiful and you see so much wildlife there! It's a beautiful part of the country.
In my neighborhood in NH I have seen deer, coyotes, bears, raccoons, ground hogs, skunks, porcupines, possums, fox, and bats. There are Bob cats but never saw one.
The critters were here (Canada) long before we were. They serve a purpose. I love skunks and had one in my back yard 2 nights ago. I just spoke to it softly, it looked at me and then carried on digging for grubs in the grass. A friend had an orphaned one as a pet for years. It played with their dog and would sit on the couch with them nibbling on their toes. Raccoons are everywhere. Coyotes sound eerie in the night and you know when they've cornered a prey.☹Canada's west coast has a lot of bald eagles. Opossums look weird but are beneficial and eat a lot of grubs, especially ticks.
I've seen plenty of raccoons, but my favorite raccoon encounter was watching a mother racoon and her babies in a cherry tree picking and eating cherries. Very cute.
The part that is the worst to me is the eye burn if it sprays anywhere close to you. I live next to a busy street so sometimes in the spring one gets hit at night and the smell and eye burn drift over the neighborhood.
As a child I had a racoon that we rescued that had suffered a crushed paw as a baby, it took so long to rehab the poor little guy he couldn't go back in to the wild so we got to keep him. My grandfather had me do a lot of the bottle feeding and such so he was very attached to me and so I got to name him (Rosco P. Coaltrain from "The Dukes of Hazard" of course). He was a wonderful companion until he passed of old age. It's really a shame they don't have longer life spans. ETA: We also had an opossum somehow befriend our cats and come in through the cat door in to our back shed where I found it munching food out of a bowl along side one of our cats like they were the best of chums. It would come in all the time and only make occasionally hissing protests as either myself or my husband shoved it back out of the cat door with a broom each time.
Laughed when I saw this...that's the name we gave the one that's been "bandit'ting" through our cat door for the last couple months...perhaps it's a raccoon thing 😂
Groundhogs are also called Whistle pigs here. They make a short whistling sound. When startled the flatten out and freeze. The meat is sweetish, like a sweet pork. The Body is ioften used by rural folks as bags.
Skunk! Well known by cartoons of Pepe le Peu! They are so cute under certain circumstances. Mainly mom and little ones bopping along, checking you out as you stand very still and just take pictures and admire.
It’s fun watching your reactions to the wild animals of North America. Eagles are classified as Raptor birds. I have been in a “eagle enclosure” where one was kept in was kept and I was asked if I wanted to pet it,i said no i knew the bird’s reputation for fighting back. Eagles that have been injured and can’t live on their own, live at a sanctuary or a wildlife center become an “ambassador” for educational programs so people get to know about this bird.
Raccoons also are high carriers of rabies. AKA "Trash Pandas" nickname. They can get up to 22 pounds or a bit more, They growl, will kill chickens if you raise them and their eggs and young. While camping one of my husbands friends in the middle of the night got up to empty his bladder only to realize he was peeing on a skunk, he did manage to back away without getting sprayed. Where I live in Wisconsin you can see Bald Eagles near the Wisconsin River if your lucky you can see them fishing in the river.
The tails on White-tail deer are very obvious when they're running away because the white part is the underneath. When they run, the are straight up in the air like flags. Fun when you see a whole herd take off, backends waving. They also like to play chicken with vehicles, especially semi-trucks on the interstates. They are also pretty large. The deer I saw when I was stationed in California were tiny in comparison.
"How Bad can Skunk scent be?" You cannot even imagine. At close range, it can cause some people to vomit. Having had the misfortune of being sprayed - I can tell you that it is best avoided. The smell can be removed from your body, with some effort, but you may have to dispose of your clothes and shoes.
@@tonyburzio4107that doesn’t actually really work. It just overwhelms the human sense of smell so you’ll only notice the tomato scent… at first. Or you’ll smell a mix of tomato and skunk, but dogs and other animals can smell the skunk scent and will react to it. The way to get rid of it is to cover everything in dish soap and baking soda with NO water, let it sit, then after some time rinse it off.
I have Raccoons outside eating corn and sunflower seeds right this very minute, they are out there every night in summer, I also have Bald Eagles that live on my property and they kill my beautiful Songbirds and Woodpeckers, but what are you going to do, they have babies to feed too and their food of choice is other birds and fish! Last year a baby Raccoon was orphaned and we took care of it until winter then it was killed in a snowstorm. The groundhog predicts the weather, or so they say. Skunks often share the food pile with the Raccoons out back. They are adorable, and they rarely let off their stink bomb. It is really awful to be sprayed by a Skunk, they get their stink sac removed if they have them for a pet. We also have Opossums that share the food pile out back. You should see them when they play dead, they foam at the mouth and everything else. Also White-Tailed Deer eat corn at the food pile, only the females though the big Bucks stand back and guard the females and the babies while they eat! We also have Coyotes, but thankfully they stay in the woods! This one was really fun Andre! Great reaction too!
LOL - Living in Ohio - I have seen 1000's of racoons...lol. In fact, we were camping, my sister and my kids and I and we always have a netted tent over the picnic table/food area - and put the iron skillet on top of the cooler and the bread/snack bin...all safe ... or usually - but I was hearing notices from in the tent one night - and I look out the tent window with the flashlight see about 8 sets of eyes looking into the light...lol. My daughter wakes up as well as my sister and seeing 4 or 5 racoons had climbed under the tightly attached tent and were really working at getting the iron skillet off of the cooler and had managed to get the two pans on the other bin off and removed the lid! We get out of the tent and take our shoes and throw them toward the animals - and they are so darn cute BUT they just looked at us like "What!" lol We are like get out of here - move it - and after about what seemed like forever - they literally walked in very slow motion out from under the mesh tent and waddled back into the woods.... acting totally ticked off that we had ruined their food adventure....again, they are pretty friendly - they aren't going to attack you - but you certainly can't try to pick them up or pet them - they WILL bite you then ... but I couldn't even get mad that they got into the potato chips and the bread....lol. They don't really make good pets, they will always be very destructive unfortunately....although some people have raised them from babies - IF you find a baby and try to raise it and keep it - most States require a special permit because they are a wild animal... Ohio has 1000's of groundhogs too - see them popping their heads up - again a very cute animal -- but again, will bite etc.. sadly they aren't fast runners - and we see a lot on the side of the road (roadkill).... Yes, 1000's of skunks too . . again a VERY cute little rodent -- that you definitely don't want to approach or scare - or they WILL spray you and it really stinks...they will walk right by you and do nothing - they only spray if they feel trapped or scared... that's why dogs are usually the ones that pay the price...they chase the skunks...and you got it!! And getting that smell off a dog is NOT easy! LOL Yes, Ohio also has 1000's of opossums! They aren't that cute...and they are a very nasty little rodent...what's neat is they carry their babies on their back and if they get scared - they play dead . . . ever heard the expression "playing possum"? or playing dead.... Ohio has 1000's of white tail deer - beautiful animal!!! Yes, we also have deer hunting season . . . Coyote's are actually much thinner than the picture shown - that pic did look like a wolf would.
Raccoons are absolutely everywhere in America. A couple hours drive from where I live is Raccoon Creek State Park, in Pennsylvania. We used to go there as a kid because there's a lake and that's the closest "beach" until you get to Lake Erie. And bald eagles are kinda rare. For the longest time they used to be hunted and almost went extinct until we made them a protected species. It's illegal to tamper with their nests, and only certain licensed Natives are allowed to harvest the feathers. There's a nesting pair near my home that has a livecam set up that is available to the public to watch.
I would imagine that just about every US state has racoon's other than maybe Alaska and Hawaii, and it wouldn't shock me if those states had them as well. A better question, Andre, would have been "have any of you watching NEVER seen a racoon.".
Neither Hawaii nor Alaska has racoons natively. The closest you will find in the wild to racoons in Hawaii is mongoose. Mongoose are all over the place on Maui, Moloka'i and O'ahu. They were introduced by the sugarcane industry to combat rats in the fields in the 1880s I think.
Yes, skunks smell THAT BAD. I live in the woods in ohio and I see all these animals almost every day. And my opossums are huge, some over 20 lbs. They're not like mice, Andre.
in the U.S. you can see a variety of creatures in the forested area, not only squirrels, but racoons, opossums, deer, chipmunks, skunks, foxes, bears, and even sometimes wolves. All of which live near my house.... way out in the countryside... 10+ acres. I've been hunting since I was about 6. I started with hunting squirrels, racoons, opossums, skunks, rabbits, foxes, and snakes (we have water moccasins and ground rattlers where I grew up in South Louisiana). when I got older (14) I started hunting deer and wild boars. even the occasional bear or coyote if they came too close to our hunting grounds... the best deer I got was a 12 pt. and the biggest boar I got was 827 lbs... my family has 1,500 acre camping ground/hunting site, so we have plenty. we even get turkeys on the property. so one for each thanksgiving and christmas... and meat in the freezers year round. my children were taught how to hunt and camp (by my father during the summers. they would spend a month up there) and now my grandchildren are going to be taught how to hunt by me....
The smell of skunk is right up there with the decomposing body of an animal. It is one of the most disgusting smells I've ever had the misfortune of smelling. It's especially vile when they decide to scent mark a property.
The skunk smell is legendary. I have anosmia - no sense of smell. When camping with others twice we encountered it. Those most sensitive started retching all over, while others became faint.
You CAN domesticate raccoons if you get them as pups. When I was about 4, we had one that was orphaned. Skunks can also be domesticated as kits, you will need a vet to remove the scent glands. They enjoy digging ...a lot, so mainly an outside pet. The first o in opossum is normally silent so " possum" is what I've heard them called - my whole life. White tails and mule deer, " mulies" are larger than Euro deer. Coyotes CAN be domesticated. It's fairly common here in Nevada
My sister had a puppy that was part coyote and part dog. Highly intelligent animal. She ended up as my grandmother's dog and both were happy with the arrangement.
domestication is a generations-long process of selectively breeding for traits that make the animal beneficial to humans. You can have tamed pups, but they're stil wild and always will be.
Skunks don't actually smell that bad themselves, but they can spray you with liquid stink so intense it can make you physically ill. When I was younger we had a dog that got sprayed by a skunk, and we couldn't bring him into the house for 2 weeks. We washed him every day, and he still smelled so bad it would make you eyes tear up.
Yep yep! It's strange, I never owned a dog that hasn't been sprayed. I don't think I've owned a dog that has ever been sprayed twice either, lol. It's almost like a christening of a ship or the baptism of a child. Every North American dog learns that lesson sometime, it's like some cruel rite of passage or something.
Raccoons can be tamed, my uncle had one as a pet for years. He had to childproof all his cabinets to keep the raccoon out of the food and trash in his house. It’s 11 pm and I’ve got one right now at my critter feeder. I love watching the wild animals and I get squirrel, raccoon, groundhog, opossums. Groundhogs are size of a raccoon.
You can't be expected to know all the wild animals in another country. Racoons seem to be everywhere in North America and can be a real nuisance since they have thumbs to open everything just like we do. They do not domesticate well. They will tear up your house. Groundhogs are much bigger than a hamster, but I have never seen a live one. I have seen and smelled a skunk, but not up close. If they spray you with their smell they say it is very hard to remove the odor from your clothing and body. Opossums or possums are really mean and can be really big. One stared me down and ran me out of my back yard once. I LOVE COYOTES!! They are so smart and resourceful. They have infiltrated our cities and live peacefully with humans by becoming nocturnal. We have thousands in Chicago and occasionally people see them. I saw one on my block near downtown Chicago AT 3:00 am once. They are beautiful. They have drastically reduced the rabbit population though.
Skunks have a distinctive scent. It gets in the back of your throat. I had a dog once who went on a skunk killing spree and killed six in six months. About the time everything settled down he’d go after another. I thank God we don’t have porcupines down here where I live. He wouldn’t have survived.
Another fact! The bald eagle does not have a loud epic cry like shown on TV typically. That is actually the cry of a hawk as bald eagles actually sound more like sqweekie toys.
When I was a kid, we have a racoon and a skunk that lived together, under our shed. You really don't want to play with a wild racoon. Recently I had one in my yard, suffering from distemper. We have to make sure to keep our dog away from it. I am very lucky, a neighbor dispatched it for me.
I love watching your reactions. You certainly aren’t dumb because you’ve never lived where these animals live. It’s fun hearing you trying to figure things out. The smell of a skunk is pretty rank. The worst part is it lasts a very long time. It’s hard to wash off. When people try to keep skunks as pets, they have them “descented”. I understand that doesn’t always completely take care of the problem. Opossoms have huge teeth but aren’t aggressive. They will always leave the area if you give them a chance.
We lived in Cripple Creek Colorado. About 10000 ft elevation. A racoon family lived under our porch. They are so darn cute, but will try, with force, to open your doors, swing from the rafters, and tear the siding off your house. Ive heard they love hot dogs, spaghetti, and cherrios!
I've had over 20 pet raccoons throughout the years, 6 pet squirrels, 2 pet deer, two skunks, a pet groundhog, a beaver, a fox, a coyote, and I currently have a opossum.
About skunks, they can make great pets. The smell ends when their scent glands are surgically removed. Adopt a baby skunk then never release it into the wild as without their fragrant abilities the animal wouldn't be as able to defend itself.
lol, yes skunks smell really really really bad. A few years ago I was walking my 2 dogs and all 3 of us got sprayed. It kind of smells like burnt rubber but 100 times worse.
Skunk smell is impossible to describe, but the comparisons to rotting carcasses gives you a pretty good idea. The scent is also difficult to remove from fabric. Sometimes the only thing you can do with affected clothing is throw it away. Nevertheless, skunks are really interesting animals. They actually prefer not to spray. Once they use their spray, their bodies take a week and a half to make more. Skunks usually only spray when they're completely cornered, and even then, they send warning signals first. In my opinion, the coolest things about skunks is that they can eat snakes because they're immune to venom.
The suit in Mario 3 is a tanuki, which is different from a raccoon. Tanuki are dogs and aren't Raccoons at all. So the tanuki costume in Mario 3 is technically a dog costume. The tanuki has more in common with a wolf than a Raccoon.
You should really check out the movie "Groundhog Day." In America, we leave our spring-time weather prognosticators to the rodents on Feb 2. The famous groundhog comes out, and if he sees his shadow, it's more winter; if not, early summer. The movie, however, is about a weatherman filming the Groundhog Day celebrations and gets stuck reliving the same day over and over. Fantastic movie. Funny, but makes you think.
Funny story…. I lived in an apartment and the trash dumpsters always had raccoons in them. Taking out the garbage was a 2 person thing. One of us would run out and open the dumpster. Then we would wait for the raccoons to run out, etc. then the next person would run out and throw the garbage into the dumpster. Then the first person would run back and close the dumpster. 🙈😂
They used to jump out at me all the time at one club I worked at. Till I started going out with a broom and smacking the dumpster before I dumped trash in there. Smack the dumpster they would get the hint and jump out. I went into work one night and there was a feral cat and a coon brawling in front of the dumpster. Guess they were fighting over who got trash rights that night. The dumpster here at my house never had that problem and there are plenty racoons here. Last summer there was 3 bears trying to get into it though. Woke up to a banging outside at like 5am. Look out there 3 bear. They couldn't figure out how to get it open. There was bear paw prints all over it. Took forever for the rain to finally wash the prints off. Been woke up but other loud noises out there between the house and body shop too and seen some strange things. 2 times there was a damn cow out there. One night my grandma spent the night and there was a cow out there licking her car real early in the morning
We have all of those animals here where I live in Southwestern Missouri. I see many of them almost daily. The deer, racoons, possums are in out yard EVERY day, and a groundhog lives under our shed and we see him/her a lot also. Bald Eagles are common around our lakes, and of course coyotes are common EVERYWHERE. Skunks of course are all over our roads during certain times of they year,. You try not to run over the carcass with your tires as the stench will stay with your car for days. Skunks are one of the strongest smells you can encounter in nature. Kind of like a tear gas attack.
Skunks can be made into pets, the scent glands are removed when the are in the kitten stage. They have no smell issue afterwards but you need to be total comitted because they can never be released back into the wild because is they are completely helpless.
Fun fact for the uninitiated: striped and spotted skunks have distinctive smells and you can get to know the difference. Spotted skunks are extremely flat and can get in places you wouldn't think possible.
Actually its only the Tanuki suit that turns into a statue and its based on myth in folklore about Takuni who have massive testicles and can transform into various forms at will. They are commonly referred to as "raccoon dogs", which probably why the raccoon leaf and tanuki suit tails are similar in pattern and people confuse the two. There are plenty of japanese media which have the mischievous Tanuki prominently featured in them.
skunks are sometimes kept as pets even if they probably shouldn't be, when someone does keep one as a pet they almost always have the spray gland removed so they cant spray the smell any longer. Its naturally a defense mechanism for the skunk to get away from predators it doesn't just smell, it'll burn your eyes and make them watery so the skunk can make its escape.
I used to live on a 1000-acre ranch in Northern California, and we had a pair that roosted on top of a high power line tower not too far from our houses. OMG! When these Eagles would fly over our houses, their shadows would shade my entire house making it rather dark. It would cast a shadow on both sides of my house at the same time. It was amazing! I loved watching them fly over. Even though I would see them all the time, every time one would fly over I would stop (pull over if I was on the road and not a ranch road, and just watch them. I remember being a little late for school and telling my teacher that we stopped to watch the bald eagle flying around us. Coyotes are scrawnier and scrappier looking than the wolf. Nowhere as majestic.
I live in the northeast US near Boston,and we have white tail deer, raccoons, and a pair of bald eagles living nearby. We also have a family of groundhogs living in our backyard under the deck. We have coyotes as well, and they’re about 1/3 the size of a timber wolf.
I live in Central Pennsylvania. I've seen them all go through my backyard except for the mule deer of course. I've seen the occasional bald eagle fly over as well.
I live in eastern Pennsylvania, and I have 2 huge ground hogs in my backyard. I feed them catfood and they are so adorable!! The skunks sometimes decide to eat some too!
Groundhogs also climb trees and you can see them above your head too. Coyotes can cross with wolves and dogs, so we get coywolves and coydogs, as well as wolf dog crosses. I live in Michigan and we have all of those animals, plus moose, bears and mountain lions.
8:53 skunk spray is the inspiration for tear gas.... The noxious scent of skunk spray can be long-lasting and overpowering. Skunk spray contains sulfur-based organic compounds called thiols. These compounds let off an immediate blast of acrid scent, reminiscent of rotten eggs. Skunk spray also contains thioacetates. Thioacetates remain dormant at first, but can morph into smell-producing thiols when they come into contact with water or humidity. This can happen days or longer after the skunking occurred. It’s the thioacetates in skunk spray that give it its staying power. it burns your nasal cavity and eyes... you will tear up and you nose will run profusely.... and it's not easy to wash off and tomato juice doesn't do anything... How to remove skunk smell from people If you get “skunked,” an immediate bath or shower should be your first step for removing the smell. In scientific terms, this means you’ll be attempting to oxidize the thiols into sulfonic acids, which have little-to-no skunk smell left in them. Wash your entire body with deodorant soap or a grease-cutting dish detergent. Wash your hair with a shampoo made for oily hair. You can also soak in a baking-soda bath for 15 to 20 minutes: Pour 2 to 4 cups of baking soda into hot water. Rinse to remove the residue from your skin. How to remove skunk smell from pets If your pet gets sprayed, create a homemade mixture of: 1 quart 3 percent hydrogen peroxide (If you don’t have hydrogen peroxide on hand, you can try white vinegar.) 1 teaspoon baby shampoo or grease-cutting dish detergent 1/4 cup baking soda Lather this mixture onto your pet’s fur and let it sit for five minutes. Make sure not to get it into their eyes. Then rinse and wash your pet with their regular shampoo. Repeat if necessary. Keep in mind that hydrogen peroxide may lighten your pet’s fur, so don’t leave the lather on for more than five minutes at a time Do not store the leftover mixture in a sealed container or bottle, since there is a risk it could explode.
Skunk smell also takes along time to go away and if it sprays you or a pet you literally have to bath in tomato juice as it seems to be the only thing to get rid of it. They were a real issue in my area in the 80s and 90s but are rare now. An odd side note: cats apparently think skunks, raccoons, and opossums are other cats as ours share the food with them.
I have a ground hog under my deck. He comes out and sits on the deck. He also wreaks havoc on my yard digging holes. They don't like human scent. Couldn't catch him in a trap, he was a little too smart for that, haven't seen him since I put an air refresher under my deck. He used to run from my house to my neighbor's house. He is big!
Asking an American if they've ever seen a Raccoon is like asking a Frenchman if they've ever seen bread
Well said!
Lol, true true
ROFL true and hilarious comment
Usually on the side of the road. 😢 along with skunks.
Yes 😂
Okay, to answer a couple of your questions:
1. Domesticating raccoons: It has been done, but I think it’s like having a pet gangster.
2. Skunks: “Skunk” is a Native American name for this North American species of a member of the weasel family that occurs on several continents. They secrete some horrible potion from glands in their butts when they feel threatened. And they spray it with force, so you don’t just smell it - you get covered in it. And it’s nice and oily so you can’t easily get rid of it. Not a lot of people are dumb enough to get “skunked” twice. As for the smell, it’s not like poop. It’s more like tear gas. A direct hit from an adult skunk can make you choke, your eyes water - it’s strong stuff. Fortunately, they’re mostly nocturnal, so you have to go to some effort to cross paths with one. We had a skunk living under the front porch of our house once, and it was fine most of the time. We were active in the day, it was active at night. It was only an issue if it got into a fight with another nocturnal animal. Then the skunk fumes were strong enough to wake me out of a sound sleep - on the second floor of the house.
3. Virginia Opossum: Our Friend, the Opossum, is beloved among all right-thinking people in the USA. They are the very definition of “ugly-cute.” They are North America’s only marsupial. They are inoffensive and shy and adorable in behavior if not in looks. They are about the size of a cat, snack on deer ticks, are almost completely immune to rabies, carry their babies on their backs like a mommy-bus, have prehensile tails and forepaws like little hands, and are so sensitive to stress that they literally pass out when frightened, falling into a 10-minute coma at the drop of a hat. It is a sign of good character (imo) to love opossums, and protect and respect them.
🤣 "...like having a pet gangster." Just about fell out of my chair over this one, LOL! And you are, of course, so very right about this. They're cute, but they're far too clever, and far too destructive without intending any malice. And many of them do carry rabies.
I love opossums, and I have to disagree that they are "ugly-cute:" I think those faces are as cute as can be.
We have one in the neighborhood who shows up from time to time to snag some of the food we put out for the outside cats. If it finds cat food, it eats it and if it doesn't, like last night, it gets itself a drink of water from a big water dish we also keep out for kitties, and it does it without dumping a lot of shrub or tree detritus or even just mud from its paws into the water. Very mannerly!
And then it goes on its way.
As for respecting them, they may be shy but when pushed to it they know how to use every single one of their 50 (fifty) teeth. And they will---if you leave them no exit and therefore no choice, but I'm sure you're aware of all this.
Delighted to meet another opossum lover!
I will add that we don't call them Opossums, but Possums and I have to disagree with you on their cuteness factor. The only thing scarier than walking into your yard late at night and being met with those devil like, glow in the dark eyeballs, is to actually get a look at the creature behind them. They may be beneficial to the environment, but cute they are not.
@@dmpvip I'm not sure if you're addressing this to me, but it seems that you are, so I'm responding.
Original commenter *jenfries6417* opined that opossums (that's the real, official name, so using the "O" at the beginning of the word isn't wrong, and since she did, I did, too at least in part to avoid this) are, and I quote, "...the very definition of ugly-cute."
Now, we have three opinions expressed: hers, which is "ugly-cute;" mine, which is that their faces are "...cute as can be," and yours, which is that 'possums have "...devil like, glow in the dark eyeballs, ... [and that the creature behind them" well, you didn't say explicitly, only that you don't find them cute.
Just for the record, I have come home after full dark, and surprised a 'possum who was dining at the outdoor cats' food dish on the back porch; it abandoned the food, and slipped around past a five-gallon lidded bucket of pasteurized, pelletized poultry manure, and just waited in the darkness (house and I were new to each other at the time, didn't have a back porch light installed then) for me to go indoors.
But I could still see its light-colored hindquarters and its tail, so I spoke to it and it dropped over the side of the porch, and disappeared into the neighbor's hedge.
Had some 'possum encounters in recent years, too. Always relaxed and rather shy and not looking for trouble.
I'm not looking for trouble here, either, but, again just for the record, I'm no more likely to change my mind about 'possums than you are to change yours.
Pet gangster is exactly the perfect description
Raccoons are like a cross between a bear, cat, and monkey. They can be befriended, but make bad pets.
Skunks have a unique but horrible smell. Once you smell it, you will never forget it.
Skunks spray their smell from glands on their anus.
Some people have these surgically removed and keep the Skunk as a pet.
Beautiful animal though if you can get around the stink.
if it sprays you can smell it hours later and miles away.
I love the smell, unless it is freshly sprayed extremely near.
Don't worry Andre. It was fun watching you learn.
Fun fact from an older (57 years old) American. Benjamin Franklin wanted our National Symbol to be a turkey. The exact bird we eat at our national holiday of Thanksgiving. Crazy. Opossums are not very attractive and fierce looking, but are actually very beneficial animals. They eat ticks and many other pests and don't carry rabies. Unlike raccoons. Respect and love opossums.
Funner fact, he did not. IIRC Franklin just penned a funny letter to his daughter about the nobility of the turkey and how it should be the national bird over the lazy bald eagle. He did it for a laugh. People confuse the private letter for something more all the time. When he was on the first committee to decided the national seal, he voted for no bird. Subsequent committees decided on using the bald eagle, sealing it as the national bird. So the most we can say is that Franklin wanted no birds at all.
Skunks don't smell like poop. It is a musk smell. If you have a dog that has been freshly sprayed by a skunk, it is so strong it is like tear gas. It so strong it burns your eyes, makes them water.
It's one of those smells that you can't accurately explain, someone has to smell it to understand.
@@KuniiMatsui would say really strong piss with a hint of rotten garbage lol
@@KuniiMatsu Definitely!
@@KuniiMatsuno, you can say it smells like weed. If they live somewhere where it is legal they will absolutely know the smell lol it can be hard to determine the difference if you live somewhere with an abundance of both!
Skunks smell like really BAD body sweat + marijuana. You cannot escape the smell.
You're not dumb. We don't know what we don't know. Keep being you. I love listening to you talk.
As far as I'm aware, many people who keep skunks as pets first have the animal's scent gland removed.
Many people do this, not just for skunks, but also for other members of the weasel family. Although skunks are the most pungent.
Although when my mother was a child, she had a skunk as a pet, and it was not descented.
I once lived where a neighbor fed a couple feral cats. I got a laser pointer to play with them from my 2nd story landing. They had no interest in it. There was a skunk and raccoon however, that both enjoyed chasing after the red dot 😂 later discovered some fish would also try to chase after it!
That's right about having a skunk's scent glands removed. Si you can have them as pets. My best friend down the street, in 2nd grade, had a pet skunk. It was usually hiding behind the stove during day. So we seldom saw it. But you'd smell them on drives in the country cuz they'd get hit by a car. And you could smell them for a long way. You never forget that smell. There's nothing I know you can compare that smell to. But NOT poop! But bad!
Opossums are the only baby animals that aren't cute. And they don't get cuter as adults. They have a weird rat-like tail they can hang from tree limbs.
Opossum really are cute. When threatened they play dead.
@@kimveverka2356 That's true!! I forgot about the "playing dead" part!
You can smell a dead skunk in your car driving by it with the windows and vents closed. It's that potent.
A groundhog is like a hamster only if your hamsters are two feet long. It's actually a large ground squirrel. The smell of a skunk is so strong that I passed over a dead one in my car once, and my car smelled of it for a week. Raccoons are very intelligent and have hands. The US didn't get native monkeys but raccoons sort of fill that nuisance roll in our ecosystem.
Trash Pandas!
them and squirrels
Actually, a lowland marmot, (Marmota monax). Other species of of marmots in NA and Eurasia are mostly confined to high-altitude areas.
" The nuisance role" LOL yes!
@@scorpiouk5914 This made me laugh!
Skunks smell isn't their natural state, it's their defense. They can spray some very foul smelling stuff when they feel threatened and you can smell it from a very long way away. If you're out driving in the country or even sometimes the city you will know if a skunk has sprayed at some point within a couple hundred meters if you smell it. I've been pretty close to them before and never been sprayed, the key is not to panic if you see one, you don't want to surprise it. If you're sprayed you have to take a bath in tomato juice or you're going to smell horrible for weeks.
There is a bald eagle named Murphy at a sanctuary in Missouri that can't fly because of an injury when he was younger and in 2023 he built a nest and started trying to incubate a rock during the breeding season since he doesn't have a mate. He even had to be put in a separate enclosure due too him chasing away other eagles protectively, the sanctuary got word of an eaglet-(baby eagle) that fell out of a nest and needed a home do they decided to try and see if Murphy would adopt this eaglet and sure enough he did. He raised him till he was old enough to be released back into the wild and they funnily enough named that eagle Rocky. And now Murphy is raising another eaglet that was found orphaned.
Awe!!! ❤
@@scorchtail6655 He's super vigilant, too.
For fans of Warner Brothers cartoons, real roadrunners are only the size of a large crow, or small raven, and they can fly well, so coyotes are no real threat to them.
Opossum are very shy. You want them in your yard. They eat bugs, lots of bugs,especially ticks.
If you ever trap them they are nightmares to deal with. Had one get into a cat trap and the a hole didn't want to leave.
And they play dead 💀
And they’re ugly 🤢
I have one that hangs around, it isn't bothered that I'm out at night or just walks around me and continues on it's way, I've followed it around too, very chill
@@m2hmghbSome like a trapped possum. The house where I grew up had a large back porch on a concrete slab. A family of possums once took up residence under the slab. My dog, a wire haired terrier mix, loved to go under the slab and into their den, treating all of us on the other side of the slab to quite an array of snarling, screaming and scuffling, and then she would emerge with bright eyes, bloody face and wagging tail, ready to do it all over again in a couple of days.
Andre, we also have bears,wolves, and alligators. We also have rattlesnakes and copperhead snakes. That is why 6 year olds in the country used to get their first rifle.
Opossums are cute when they aren’t upset and snarling! I like the one who lives in my back yard.
In the 1960s due to hunting and pesticides damaging bird eggs, the bald eagle was almost extinct in the USA, you could only see it on the remote coasts and around national parks out west. Even in the 90s it was very very rare to see it in the majority of the States. But the today the population has made a huge recovery. I've even seen them around lakes here in Indiana. I think at its lowest point there were maybe 800 left, and now there are over 300,000 in the United States.
Fun fact: one of those pesticides was called DDT. Very strong stuff, but it caused the eagle’s eggs to have a thin shell that was almost guaranteed to break.
But it was also the only pesticide that works on bedbugs. The ban on DDT caused the bedbug population to explode.
So the thin shells of eagle eggs led to our current bedbug infestation.
I'm fifty two and I remember them being rare but now we see them around here in Florida.
I've seen thousands of racoons, and I think most Americans would say the same thing. They're cute, but they are WILD animals! They are also very destructive. In one place I lived they got into our attic from the outside. It took us weeks to get them out. They can be very fierce, and if they attack a person, they can do a lot of damage. They are also rabies carriers. I have never been deliberately mean to a racoon, but I would never try to make friends with one.
Groundhogs look like hamsters, but they're about 100 time bigger.
I've been skunked. It's like being tear-gassed! Seriously, I ended up vomiting uncontrolably. It doesn't smell anything like "poop."
Possums are wonderful! They kill pests like ticks, and they don't carry rabies. Yea Possums!
I live in the middle of Providence, Rhode Island, and my yard overlooks a graveyard. We see coyotes in there all the time.
You are spot on ❤
I have to technically say that they are called Opossums. Possums are in Australia. I have some family that live there and they have corrected me also 😂
@@SherriLyle80s I don't doubt it, and the possums in Australia are probably different animals. But herre in New England everybody calls opossums "possums", and I believe the same is true down south. It's not something that I think will change any time soon.
@@christopherstephenjenksbsg4944yep, the possums are possums down South as well (at least in Arkansas). They told me so. Then they hissed at me and told me I’d smoked enough for the night, and I should go inside and stop talking to possums. 😁
@@ashleydixon4613 That's hilarious! Possums are so cool!
We have Opossums put up residents in our yard off and on. Love having them, not only do they eat the bugs and snails (that eat up my flowers and garden) but they also keep the rats away which is a huge bonus.
Let me tell you all about "domesticated" racoons: the answer is no. I was at a house party once with a bunch of hippies and punk rock people. We're standing on the front lawn, drinking and having a good time, when a hippy comes up to the party with his pet racoon. Naturally, all the hippies and punks say, "aw man, that's a cool pet! What a cute racoon!" and they pet it, and he goes in the house to get a beer.
Going inside, the racoon does the first thing you would expect a racoon to do: it finds the bathroom and immediately tips over the trashcan looking for anything to eat. Then it wanders into the kitchen and knocks that trashcan over too. They're great pets if you're homeless. Not so much if you have a house with standing trashcans lol.
Sounds like the people shoulda given the racoon some party snacks! Imagine inviting someone to a party and then forgetting to feed them!
🤣👍
This raccoon seems to be particularly misbehaved for "domesticated" ones
They are still wonderful lil terrors but not that bad usually
Japan has lots of domesticated racoons
A person I worked with several years ago knew someone with a raccoon. This person, their spouse and young child petted the raccoon. A week or so later, the raccoon went rabid. All of the mentioned people had to get rabies shots.
13:30 That's Golden Eagles you are thinking of. Bald Eagles go after fish and water birds. They also eat carrion.
Wiley E Coyote Looney Tunes cartoons: The bird also exists. It is called a greater roadrunner, while not actually blue, it is a lovely bird. Spoiler, They don't eat seeds either, They eat things like insects and lizards etc. I live in the Mojave desert and see them regularly. I love them.
Also, the ones we saw when we lived in New Mexico were only about as tall as a mid-calf sock - having grown up in the midwest, I was DEFINITELY surprised!
@@jessecolson4698 Yes, they are not as big as a coyote....
Do you automatically say "meep-meep" when you see one? I still do that to this day...
@@SuzA8110 Yes, as juvenile as it is, you are not alone in that.
@@SuzA8110 Of course! :)
Opossums aren't mice. They are Marsupials (pouches they raise their young in) and they are about the size of a small dog. They look way scarier then they are.
What the hell is a skunk? After you smell one, you will never have to ask that question again.
Word
Have you ever seen a porcupine? It's almost like a spikey groundhog...
This is your advanced English lesson for today. You must say it as fast as possible.
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
As much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
I can PROVE I'm American! Spits out 'how much wood would a woodchuck...'
How much ground could a groundhog hog if a groundhog could hog ground?
A wood chuck, can chuck, as much as a wood. As a wood chuck, can chuck wood. spoiler alert . A wood chuck, cant chuck wood.
@@julianneavery6995 😂
I think groundhogs do actually hog ground.
I'm trying to remember a source but all that comes to mind is Caddyshack. 😁😜😂
If a woodchuck could chuck, would chuck wood, how much wood could a woodchuck chuck?
I live in upstate New York. We’ve had both raccoons and opossums on our porch. South of us there used to be an Army Depot. The grounds were fenced off and deer were trapped inside. Because there was no hunting, when a totally white deer was born, it lived to maturity and bred. We ended up with a population of white deer. Since the depot was decommissioned, parts of the fence have been removed and white deer are now scattered across the area.
I guess that one animal native to the US that Louis didn’t mention is the wild turkey. I have had to stop twice to let a flock of wild turkeys cross the road. We even had one in our yard. Bald Eagles were reintroduced into our area several decades ago and now we have a number of them locally.
With as crazy as they look opossums are key to the environment. They are the size of a cat, they're the only marsupial outside of Australia and New Zealand, they eat ticks and other bad insects, and they're not able to get rabies. So all in all a pretty cool animal.
But crazy mean when cornered!!!
@@MadMurdoc86 I've never found them to be that mean. Once they play dead you can move them easily (with leather gloves on of course).
@@MadMurdoc86 not mean, just absolutey terrified of you. All they can do is hiss, play dead, and make a stinky - I've literally put my hand inside a hissing possum's mouth and she did nothing. I've never even heard of someone being bitten, though I suppose it's possible.
These are incredibly common animals in the U.S., I literally saw half of this list today when going out for breakfast.
I have a raccoon living in my barn, and groundhogs all over the back of the property. White tail deer cut through my property every morning (usually about 15 of them). Possums (Opussum, both spellings are acceptable, just a regional difference) are all over the area too. Only saw a roadkilled one today, but they are a frequent sight. And the Bald Eagle, which is a rare sight in my area, I've only seen about a dozen of them over the years in the wild, but one flew right in front of my car this morning. If I can find my SD card reader, I think I caught it on dashcam, it was really close, so I want that video saved.
No mule deer in my area. And while we do have coyotes here, I haven't seen any for a couple of weeks now. Same with skunks, they're around, but mostly nocturnal, so I rarely see them, but you can smell when they're nearby. Skunks smell very bad. I hit one with my car once, it took two weeks of going to the car wash daily to get the smell off it.
Where ARE you?!!! Of course I just wonder region.
but Wow. We get a bunch of the critters here, occasional hawk. Residential neighborhood in NE, mostly small houses on small lots, some small apt buildings here and there.
When I first lived here some wild turkeys would be walking around too. I came from a bigger city sometimes living places with bigger lots but also even tighter than here. So I knew some critters but didn't know what the heck THAT was! 😂
Oh I saw a chicken once just walking down the sidewalk but my guess is he escaped from somebody's yard. I'd also been drinking and hadn't lived here long so I was like WHAT is happening HERE? Because if you saw a picture of my streets, you would not expect anybody having chickens or such a variety of everything I was seeing roaming around! 😂
Groundhogs are super cute, kind of like beavers. They're actually pretty chill except when they dig up vegetable gardens.
And their tunnels can undermine the foundation of a big building!
@bonnyj931 Sure....If you aren't maintaining your property. Because, if you are, you would be aware of the issue when it was a small problem and prevent it from becoming a big one.
🤔💭"Prarie Dog Town" -Bruce Hornsby-
Groundhogs are big squirrels
Recently discovered, in person, that groundhogs are also quite adept at climbing kudzu vines. So, think of them as monkey-beavers, without the flat leathery tail. They can sometimes even be mistaken for a really fat otter.
As a railroader, my run was out in the country. 250 miles, most of it out in the middle of nowhere? The wildlife was spectacular. The peace and solitude was unmatched. I routinely saw
bald eagles, deer, possums, raccoons, everything you could possibly imagine? 24/7. That was the best part of my job. Being able to look up in the sky with no lights, and see the Milky
Way, watching sunrise and sunsets in all their glory with no light pollution. It was breathtaking at times? I retired July 4th. 30 years. Will never experience that again. It was SO cool?
Got stopped onetime, next to a bunch of trees, night time, and hundreds of thousands of lightning bugs were in the trees? It was surreal. Coolest thing I've ever seen.
Dude! BNSF engineer
Retire 4th of Aug
30 years
I can confirm your comments
I chased the money my whole career
Missouri Texas Oklahoma Illinois Iowa Seattle Canada
My engineer seniority traveled with me as long as it was a BN yard.
The amount of wildlife we see as an occupation other than a zoo keeper is hard to match
Safe travels brother
@@craigellis8354 Engineer for UP. Be careful my brother? You will miss the people. You will miss your job. You will NOT miss the company? It is mindblowing.
It is difficult to get used to after 30 years. There is a place in North Platte Ne. called Donna's Office Service that can help deal with all the paperwork invovled for retirement.
There are only two companies in the U.S. that offer this. I highly reccomend it. Her name is Julie, Donna was her mom. Julie said she gets railroaders from all over
the U.S. that do business with her. RRB was virtually no help, after looking at everything, to me. The other guy that offers this is in Oregon, I think.
Just a couple hundred bucks. Well worth it. Maybe save you money you might miss on your own? She does all the paperwork. Once you sign everything,
there is no going back to "undo" or "redo" it. It's good to have a professional doing it all for you. Good Luck and God Bless.
@@craigellis8354 My comments keep getting deleted? Donnas Office Supply in North Platte Ne can help you with retirement paperwork. Highly reccomended from RR all across the US.
@@craigellis8354 Good Luck and God Bless.
@@craigellis8354 Look into Donnas Office Supply In North Platte Ne for help on retirement stuff? Well worth it. Only 2 companies in the us that offer this?
Raccoons can be friendly if you feed them, but they are always wild.
Please don’t feed them. Feeding wild animals will get them killed
It's pretty easy to adopt an orphan raccoon and they make a decent pet but their intelligence means they will constantly be getting into mischief.
I would say a friend more than a pet. You don't want an adult racoon living in your house.
The small is so bad, we have a song, bad skunk in the middle of the road.
Makes sense
Here in America we have what some call "skunk weed." Good weed can kinda smell lke a skunk...
My son has four raccoons that people dumped him with when they decided to be irresponsible. They are house pets but very very active. Vets will not even see them and put them down right away due to rabies fears. We live in Montana and keep telling people to leave the babies in the wild. They are spoiled and loved now but should have been left in the wild. Love your channel.
There are plenty of vets in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that will see raccoons.
Yes skunk is that bad . The spray is self defense and if your pet gets sprayed it can make them and you physically ill. The smell is also incredibly difficult to get off.
Skunks have two very different smells. If your dog gets skunked, you need to de-skunk it immediately. If you are driving and smell a skunk, it’s completely different - I was in my 30s before I realized that dead skunk smells like pot smoke (I don’t toke, so didn’t make the connection).
9:27
you can keep a skunk as a pet, but you have to have the musk glands removed first so they don't spray you...
People have tried domesticating raccoons, but they tend to be destructive when they're kept indoors. I remember reading an article about scientists who wanted to use raccoons as test subjects because of their intelligence. They had to abandon the study because the raccoons kept breaking out of their cages and making a shambles of the lab.
I've seen a family of raccoons pick a lock.I've seen them on tie bags. They will even send out a decoy... So you Focus on the decoy while they steal your food. Seen it myself.
Coyotes are infamous for using the bait tactic on people's pet dogs. They get the dog to chase them or simply follow an attack them with the whole pack. I hear the coyotes often at night in the distance barking and howling which is kinda mixed together so I call it harking lol but anyway that usually means they are running another animal down or have actually done so.
Andre, you're not dumb and you're not ignorant! You're just in the process of learning and we don't expect you to know everything right away. It's kind of funny though when you asked if any of us have ever seen raccoons because they are incredibly common! I live in Massachusetts and you don't really see them too often because they are nocturnal, but every once in a while you catch a glimpse of them and they definitely make themselves known by doing things like sorting through trash. Skunks, deer, and coyotes are common here as well.
By the way, I noticed that you smiled when you mentioned Laurence's cat. You've mentioned also having a cat. I think you should bring your cat on sometime! People love cats! I guarantee that a video featuring your cat would put a lot of smiles on a lot of peoples faces! Maybe you can at least tell us its name?
I love that he mentioned Coeur D'Alene Idaho. I've lived in that area my entire life, it's beautiful and you see so much wildlife there! It's a beautiful part of the country.
In my neighborhood in NH I have seen deer, coyotes, bears, raccoons, ground hogs, skunks, porcupines, possums, fox, and bats. There are Bob cats but never saw one.
I used to see bobcats all the time here in Florida, but not recently.
Live in Indiana and all except bear and porcupines I've seen in my yard.
The critters were here (Canada) long before we were. They serve a purpose. I love skunks and had one in my back yard 2 nights ago. I just spoke to it softly, it looked at me and then carried on digging for grubs in the grass. A friend had an orphaned one as a pet for years. It played with their dog and would sit on the couch with them nibbling on their toes. Raccoons are everywhere. Coyotes sound eerie in the night and you know when they've cornered a prey.☹Canada's west coast has a lot of bald eagles. Opossums look weird but are beneficial and eat a lot of grubs, especially ticks.
I love how open-minded and interested you are to learning something new. I hope Santiago will be able to have that too.
With Andre as his father and role model I'm sure he will 😊
Raccoons were common pets in Italy, I heard, and still kept as pets in Japan.
I've seen plenty of raccoons, but my favorite raccoon encounter was watching a mother racoon and her babies in a cherry tree picking and eating cherries. Very cute.
Skunk smells like a really strong weed, hence why skunk is a nickname for pot
Yes, skunk spray smells like nothing you have ever smelled before and never want to smell again!
I don't try to describe it, it's just that foul. The only smell I've found that rivals decomposing animals.
The smell of marijuana X1000 plus
a little bit of rotten fish.
The part that is the worst to me is the eye burn if it sprays anywhere close to you. I live next to a busy street so sometimes in the spring one gets hit at night and the smell and eye burn drift over the neighborhood.
Here in NW Oregon we have all of these animals and more! My husband and I live in the countryside and we see them all from time to time.
As a child I had a racoon that we rescued that had suffered a crushed paw as a baby, it took so long to rehab the poor little guy he couldn't go back in to the wild so we got to keep him. My grandfather had me do a lot of the bottle feeding and such so he was very attached to me and so I got to name him (Rosco P. Coaltrain from "The Dukes of Hazard" of course). He was a wonderful companion until he passed of old age. It's really a shame they don't have longer life spans.
ETA: We also had an opossum somehow befriend our cats and come in through the cat door in to our back shed where I found it munching food out of a bowl along side one of our cats like they were the best of chums. It would come in all the time and only make occasionally hissing protests as either myself or my husband shoved it back out of the cat door with a broom each time.
Laughed when I saw this...that's the name we gave the one that's been "bandit'ting" through our cat door for the last couple months...perhaps it's a raccoon thing 😂
I used to have opossums come in my cat door all the time. I could actually pick them up to toss them out.
Groundhogs are also called Whistle pigs here. They make a short whistling sound. When startled the flatten out and freeze. The meat is sweetish, like a sweet pork. The Body is ioften used by rural folks as bags.
Skunk! Well known by cartoons of Pepe le Peu! They are so cute under certain circumstances. Mainly mom and little ones bopping along, checking you out as you stand very still and just take pictures and admire.
It’s fun watching your reactions to the wild animals of North America. Eagles are classified as Raptor birds. I have been in a “eagle enclosure” where one was kept in was kept and I was asked if I wanted to pet it,i said no i knew the bird’s reputation for fighting back. Eagles that have been injured and can’t live on their own, live at a sanctuary or a wildlife center become an “ambassador” for educational programs so people get to know about this bird.
Raccoons also are high carriers of rabies. AKA "Trash Pandas" nickname. They can get up to 22 pounds or a bit more, They growl, will kill chickens if you raise them and their eggs and young. While camping one of my husbands friends in the middle of the night got up to empty his bladder only to realize he was peeing on a skunk, he did manage to back away without getting sprayed. Where I live in Wisconsin you can see Bald Eagles near the Wisconsin River if your lucky you can see them fishing in the river.
skunk: "c'mon man, not cool"
The tails on White-tail deer are very obvious when they're running away because the white part is the underneath. When they run, the are straight up in the air like flags. Fun when you see a whole herd take off, backends waving. They also like to play chicken with vehicles, especially semi-trucks on the interstates. They are also pretty large. The deer I saw when I was stationed in California were tiny in comparison.
"How Bad can Skunk scent be?"
You cannot even imagine.
At close range, it can cause some people to vomit.
Having had the misfortune of being sprayed -
I can tell you that it is best avoided.
The smell can be removed from your body, with some effort,
but you may have to dispose of your clothes and shoes.
The antidote to skunk is tomato juice. Bathing in tomato juice. Who cares what it costs, you'll pay.
@@tonyburzio4107that doesn’t actually really work. It just overwhelms the human sense of smell so you’ll only notice the tomato scent… at first. Or you’ll smell a mix of tomato and skunk, but dogs and other animals can smell the skunk scent and will react to it. The way to get rid of it is to cover everything in dish soap and baking soda with NO water, let it sit, then after some time rinse it off.
@@tonyburzio4107I still can't face tomato juice - and that wash off was 50 years ago.
@@theblackbear211 - The spray from a skunk can actually cause an allergic reaction in a dog and cause it to become anaemic and even die.
@@susieq9801 yep.
I have Raccoons outside eating corn and sunflower seeds right this very minute, they are out there every night in summer, I also have Bald Eagles that live on my property and they kill my beautiful Songbirds and Woodpeckers, but what are you going to do, they have babies to feed too and their food of choice is other birds and fish! Last year a baby Raccoon was orphaned and we took care of it until winter then it was killed in a snowstorm. The groundhog predicts the weather, or so they say. Skunks often share the food pile with the Raccoons out back. They are adorable, and they rarely let off their stink bomb. It is really awful to be sprayed by a Skunk, they get their stink sac removed if they have them for a pet. We also have Opossums that share the food pile out back. You should see them when they play dead, they foam at the mouth and everything else. Also White-Tailed Deer eat corn at the food pile, only the females though the big Bucks stand back and guard the females and the babies while they eat! We also have Coyotes, but thankfully they stay in the woods! This one was really fun Andre! Great reaction too!
LOL - Living in Ohio - I have seen 1000's of racoons...lol. In fact, we were camping, my sister and my kids and I and we always have a netted tent over the picnic table/food area - and put the iron skillet on top of the cooler and the bread/snack bin...all safe ... or usually - but I was hearing notices from in the tent one night - and I look out the tent window with the flashlight see about 8 sets of eyes looking into the light...lol. My daughter wakes up as well as my sister and seeing 4 or 5 racoons had climbed under the tightly attached tent and were really working at getting the iron skillet off of the cooler and had managed to get the two pans on the other bin off and removed the lid! We get out of the tent and take our shoes and throw them toward the animals - and they are so darn cute BUT they just looked at us like "What!" lol We are like get out of here - move it - and after about what seemed like forever - they literally walked in very slow motion out from under the mesh tent and waddled back into the woods.... acting totally ticked off that we had ruined their food adventure....again, they are pretty friendly - they aren't going to attack you - but you certainly can't try to pick them up or pet them - they WILL bite you then ... but I couldn't even get mad that they got into the potato chips and the bread....lol. They don't really make good pets, they will always be very destructive unfortunately....although some people have raised them from babies - IF you find a baby and try to raise it and keep it - most States require a special permit because they are a wild animal...
Ohio has 1000's of groundhogs too - see them popping their heads up - again a very cute animal -- but again, will bite etc.. sadly they aren't fast runners - and we see a lot on the side of the road (roadkill)....
Yes, 1000's of skunks too . . again a VERY cute little rodent -- that you definitely don't want to approach or scare - or they WILL spray you and it really stinks...they will walk right by you and do nothing - they only spray if they feel trapped or scared... that's why dogs are usually the ones that pay the price...they chase the skunks...and you got it!! And getting that smell off a dog is NOT easy! LOL
Yes, Ohio also has 1000's of opossums! They aren't that cute...and they are a very nasty little rodent...what's neat is they carry their babies on their back and if they get scared - they play dead . . . ever heard the expression "playing possum"? or playing dead....
Ohio has 1000's of white tail deer - beautiful animal!!! Yes, we also have deer hunting season . . .
Coyote's are actually much thinner than the picture shown - that pic did look like a wolf would.
Neither skunks nor opossums are rodents.
As a fellow Ohioan, the above details are accurate. 😊
Raccoons are absolutely everywhere in America. A couple hours drive from where I live is Raccoon Creek State Park, in Pennsylvania. We used to go there as a kid because there's a lake and that's the closest "beach" until you get to Lake Erie. And bald eagles are kinda rare. For the longest time they used to be hunted and almost went extinct until we made them a protected species. It's illegal to tamper with their nests, and only certain licensed Natives are allowed to harvest the feathers. There's a nesting pair near my home that has a livecam set up that is available to the public to watch.
I would imagine that just about every US state has racoon's other than maybe Alaska and Hawaii, and it wouldn't shock me if those states had them as well. A better question, Andre, would have been "have any of you watching NEVER seen a racoon.".
Neither Hawaii nor Alaska has racoons natively. The closest you will find in the wild to racoons in Hawaii is mongoose. Mongoose are all over the place on Maui, Moloka'i and O'ahu. They were introduced by the sugarcane industry to combat rats in the fields in the 1880s I think.
Raccons sound terrifying when in competition for cookies cooling at the open window.
Yes, skunks smell THAT BAD. I live in the woods in ohio and I see all these animals almost every day. And my opossums are huge, some over 20 lbs. They're not like mice, Andre.
'Possums look like big greyish, very toothy rats.
in the U.S. you can see a variety of creatures in the forested area, not only squirrels, but racoons, opossums, deer, chipmunks, skunks, foxes, bears, and even sometimes wolves. All of which live near my house.... way out in the countryside... 10+ acres.
I've been hunting since I was about 6. I started with hunting squirrels, racoons, opossums, skunks, rabbits, foxes, and snakes (we have water moccasins and ground rattlers where I grew up in South Louisiana). when I got older (14) I started hunting deer and wild boars. even the occasional bear or coyote if they came too close to our hunting grounds... the best deer I got was a 12 pt. and the biggest boar I got was 827 lbs...
my family has 1,500 acre camping ground/hunting site, so we have plenty. we even get turkeys on the property. so one for each thanksgiving and christmas... and meat in the freezers year round.
my children were taught how to hunt and camp (by my father during the summers. they would spend a month up there) and now my grandchildren are going to be taught how to hunt by me....
The smell of skunk is right up there with the decomposing body of an animal. It is one of the most disgusting smells I've ever had the misfortune of smelling. It's especially vile when they decide to scent mark a property.
The skunk smell is legendary.
I have anosmia - no sense of smell.
When camping with others twice we encountered it.
Those most sensitive started retching all over, while others became faint.
You CAN domesticate raccoons if you get them as pups. When I was about 4, we had one that was orphaned.
Skunks can also be domesticated as kits, you will need a vet to remove the scent glands. They enjoy digging ...a lot, so mainly an outside pet.
The first o in opossum is normally silent so " possum" is what I've heard them called - my whole life.
White tails and mule deer, " mulies" are larger than Euro deer.
Coyotes CAN be domesticated. It's fairly common here in Nevada
My sister had a puppy that was part coyote and part dog. Highly intelligent animal. She ended up as my grandmother's dog and both were happy with the arrangement.
domestication is a generations-long process of selectively breeding for traits that make the animal beneficial to humans.
You can have tamed pups, but they're stil wild and always will be.
Skunks don't actually smell that bad themselves, but they can spray you with liquid stink so intense it can make you physically ill. When I was younger we had a dog that got sprayed by a skunk, and we couldn't bring him into the house for 2 weeks. We washed him every day, and he still smelled so bad it would make you eyes tear up.
Yep yep! It's strange, I never owned a dog that hasn't been sprayed. I don't think I've owned a dog that has ever been sprayed twice either, lol. It's almost like a christening of a ship or the baptism of a child. Every North American dog learns that lesson sometime, it's like some cruel rite of passage or something.
Raccoons can be tamed, my uncle had one as a pet for years. He had to childproof all his cabinets to keep the raccoon out of the food and trash in his house. It’s 11 pm and I’ve got one right now at my critter feeder. I love watching the wild animals and I get squirrel, raccoon, groundhog, opossums. Groundhogs are size of a raccoon.
You can't be expected to know all the wild animals in another country. Racoons seem to be everywhere in North America and can be a real nuisance since they have thumbs to open everything just like we do. They do not domesticate well. They will tear up your house. Groundhogs are much bigger than a hamster, but I have never seen a live one. I have seen and smelled a skunk, but not up close. If they spray you with their smell they say it is very hard to remove the odor from your clothing and body. Opossums or possums are really mean and can be really big. One stared me down and ran me out of my back yard once. I LOVE COYOTES!! They are so smart and resourceful. They have infiltrated our cities and live peacefully with humans by becoming nocturnal. We have thousands in Chicago and occasionally people see them. I saw one on my block near downtown Chicago AT 3:00 am once. They are beautiful. They have drastically reduced the rabbit population though.
Skunks have a distinctive scent. It gets in the back of your throat. I had a dog once who went on a skunk killing spree and killed six in six months. About the time everything settled down he’d go after another.
I thank God we don’t have porcupines down here where I live. He wouldn’t have survived.
Another fact! The bald eagle does not have a loud epic cry like shown on TV typically. That is actually the cry of a hawk as bald eagles actually sound more like sqweekie toys.
When I was a kid, we have a racoon and a skunk that lived together, under our shed. You really don't want to play with a wild racoon. Recently I had one in my yard, suffering from distemper. We have to make sure to keep our dog away from it. I am very lucky, a neighbor dispatched it for me.
The best way to fix ignorance is to acknowledge it and tackle it head on. Amazing content friend :)
I love watching your reactions. You certainly aren’t dumb because you’ve never lived where these animals live. It’s fun hearing you trying to figure things out. The smell of a skunk is pretty rank. The worst part is it lasts a very long time. It’s hard to wash off. When people try to keep skunks as pets, they have them “descented”. I understand that doesn’t always completely take care of the problem. Opossoms have huge teeth but aren’t aggressive. They will always leave the area if you give them a chance.
We lived in Cripple Creek Colorado. About 10000 ft elevation. A racoon family lived under our porch. They are so darn cute, but will try, with force, to open your doors, swing from the rafters, and tear the siding off your house. Ive heard they love hot dogs, spaghetti, and cherrios!
I've had over 20 pet raccoons throughout the years, 6 pet squirrels, 2 pet deer, two skunks, a pet groundhog, a beaver, a fox, a coyote, and I currently have a opossum.
All of the animals I raised until they could take care of themselves and then they went back into the wild.
About skunks, they can make great pets. The smell ends when their scent glands are surgically removed. Adopt a baby skunk then never release it into the wild as without their fragrant abilities the animal wouldn't be as able to defend itself.
Living in Indiana, I regularly see raccoons, possums, groundhogs and skunks visiting the cat food bowls outside.
lol, yes skunks smell really really really bad. A few years ago I was walking my 2 dogs and all 3 of us got sprayed. It kind of smells like burnt rubber but 100 times worse.
Skunk smell is impossible to describe, but the comparisons to rotting carcasses gives you a pretty good idea. The scent is also difficult to remove from fabric. Sometimes the only thing you can do with affected clothing is throw it away.
Nevertheless, skunks are really interesting animals. They actually prefer not to spray. Once they use their spray, their bodies take a week and a half to make more. Skunks usually only spray when they're completely cornered, and even then, they send warning signals first. In my opinion, the coolest things about skunks is that they can eat snakes because they're immune to venom.
The suit in Mario 3 is a tanuki, which is different from a raccoon. Tanuki are dogs and aren't Raccoons at all. So the tanuki costume in Mario 3 is technically a dog costume. The tanuki has more in common with a wolf than a Raccoon.
Of course, being Americans, when the US learned about tanuki they called them "raccoon dogs"!
Japanese folklore is rich with tales of tanuki shapeshifters with supernatural abilities, hence the Mario suit's special powers.
You should really check out the movie "Groundhog Day." In America, we leave our spring-time weather prognosticators to the rodents on Feb 2. The famous groundhog comes out, and if he sees his shadow, it's more winter; if not, early summer. The movie, however, is about a weatherman filming the Groundhog Day celebrations and gets stuck reliving the same day over and over. Fantastic movie. Funny, but makes you think.
Funny story…. I lived in an apartment and the trash dumpsters always had raccoons in them. Taking out the garbage was a 2 person thing. One of us would run out and open the dumpster. Then we would wait for the raccoons to run out, etc. then the next person would run out and throw the garbage into the dumpster. Then the first person would run back and close the dumpster. 🙈😂
They used to jump out at me all the time at one club I worked at. Till I started going out with a broom and smacking the dumpster before I dumped trash in there. Smack the dumpster they would get the hint and jump out. I went into work one night and there was a feral cat and a coon brawling in front of the dumpster. Guess they were fighting over who got trash rights that night. The dumpster here at my house never had that problem and there are plenty racoons here. Last summer there was 3 bears trying to get into it though. Woke up to a banging outside at like 5am. Look out there 3 bear. They couldn't figure out how to get it open. There was bear paw prints all over it. Took forever for the rain to finally wash the prints off. Been woke up but other loud noises out there between the house and body shop too and seen some strange things. 2 times there was a damn cow out there. One night my grandma spent the night and there was a cow out there licking her car real early in the morning
We have all of those animals here where I live in Southwestern Missouri. I see many of them almost daily. The deer, racoons, possums are in out yard EVERY day, and a groundhog lives under our shed and we see him/her a lot also. Bald Eagles are common around our lakes, and of course coyotes are common EVERYWHERE. Skunks of course are all over our roads during certain times of they year,. You try not to run over the carcass with your tires as the stench will stay with your car for days. Skunks are one of the strongest smells you can encounter in nature. Kind of like a tear gas attack.
If you've ever smelt very strong marijuana, you pretty much know what a mild skunk smell is like.
Skunks can be made into pets, the scent glands are removed when the are in the kitten stage. They have no smell issue afterwards but you need to be total comitted because they can never be released back into the wild because is they are completely helpless.
Fun fact for the uninitiated: striped and spotted skunks have distinctive smells and you can get to know the difference. Spotted skunks are extremely flat and can get in places you wouldn't think possible.
Actually its only the Tanuki suit that turns into a statue and its based on myth in folklore about Takuni who have massive testicles and can transform into various forms at will. They are commonly referred to as "raccoon dogs", which probably why the raccoon leaf and tanuki suit tails are similar in pattern and people confuse the two. There are plenty of japanese media which have the mischievous Tanuki prominently featured in them.
I don’t think anyone says O possum. You just say possum. Silent O.
Raccoons are super smart & crafty…
Unreasonably cute..
And we love our Groundhogs! Phil!!!
skunks are sometimes kept as pets even if they probably shouldn't be, when someone does keep one as a pet they almost always have the spray gland removed so they cant spray the smell any longer. Its naturally a defense mechanism for the skunk to get away from predators it doesn't just smell, it'll burn your eyes and make them watery so the skunk can make its escape.
I used to live on a 1000-acre ranch in Northern California, and we had a pair that roosted on top of a high power line tower not too far from our houses. OMG! When these Eagles would fly over our houses, their shadows would shade my entire house making it rather dark. It would cast a shadow on both sides of my house at the same time. It was amazing! I loved watching them fly over. Even though I would see them all the time, every time one would fly over I would stop (pull over if I was on the road and not a ranch road, and just watch them. I remember being a little late for school and telling my teacher that we stopped to watch the bald eagle flying around us.
Coyotes are scrawnier and scrappier looking than the wolf. Nowhere as majestic.
Raccons are pretty cool... I see them regularly in the parking lot of my apartment building next to the woods. I love the little "Trash Pandas' 😂
I live in the northeast US near Boston,and we have white tail deer, raccoons, and a pair of bald eagles living nearby. We also have a family of groundhogs living in our backyard under the deck. We have coyotes as well, and they’re about 1/3 the size of a timber wolf.
I live in Central Pennsylvania. I've seen them all go through my backyard except for the mule deer of course. I've seen the occasional bald eagle fly over as well.
I live in eastern Pennsylvania, and I have 2 huge ground hogs in my backyard. I feed them catfood and they are so adorable!! The skunks sometimes decide to eat some too!
Groundhogs also climb trees and you can see them above your head too. Coyotes can cross with wolves and dogs, so we get coywolves and coydogs, as well as wolf dog crosses. I live in Michigan and we have all of those animals, plus moose, bears and mountain lions.
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skunk spray is the inspiration for tear gas....
The noxious scent of skunk spray can be long-lasting and overpowering. Skunk spray contains sulfur-based organic compounds called thiols. These compounds let off an immediate blast of acrid scent, reminiscent of rotten eggs.
Skunk spray also contains thioacetates. Thioacetates remain dormant at first, but can morph into smell-producing thiols when they come into contact with water or humidity. This can happen days or longer after the skunking occurred. It’s the thioacetates in skunk spray that give it its staying power.
it burns your nasal cavity and eyes... you will tear up and you nose will run profusely.... and it's not easy to wash off and tomato juice doesn't do anything...
How to remove skunk smell from people
If you get “skunked,” an immediate bath or shower should be your first step for removing the smell. In scientific terms, this means you’ll be attempting to oxidize the thiols into sulfonic acids, which have little-to-no skunk smell left in them.
Wash your entire body with deodorant soap or a grease-cutting dish detergent. Wash your hair with a shampoo made for oily hair.
You can also soak in a baking-soda bath for 15 to 20 minutes:
Pour 2 to 4 cups of baking soda into hot water.
Rinse to remove the residue from your skin.
How to remove skunk smell from pets
If your pet gets sprayed, create a homemade mixture of:
1 quart 3 percent hydrogen peroxide (If you don’t have hydrogen peroxide on hand, you can try white vinegar.)
1 teaspoon baby shampoo or grease-cutting dish detergent
1/4 cup baking soda
Lather this mixture onto your pet’s fur and let it sit for five minutes. Make sure not to get it into their eyes. Then rinse and wash your pet with their regular shampoo. Repeat if necessary.
Keep in mind that hydrogen peroxide may lighten your pet’s fur, so don’t leave the lather on for more than five minutes at a time
Do not store the leftover mixture in a sealed container or bottle, since there is a risk it could explode.
Skunk smell also takes along time to go away and if it sprays you or a pet you literally have to bath in tomato juice as it seems to be the only thing to get rid of it. They were a real issue in my area in the 80s and 90s but are rare now. An odd side note: cats apparently think skunks, raccoons, and opossums are other cats as ours share the food with them.
I have a ground hog under my deck. He comes out and sits on the deck. He also wreaks havoc on my yard digging holes. They don't like human scent. Couldn't catch him in a trap, he was a little too smart for that, haven't seen him since I put an air refresher under my deck. He used to run from my house to my neighbor's house. He is big!
We have Bald eagles in the midwest on the Mississippi River when the river freezes up north they come down to St. Louis Mo. and fish on the river.