Animals With Human-Like Characteristics

Publish date: 2024-05-06

Guardians of the Galaxy made raccoons cool and sort of badass but deep down inside, they will always be trash pandas. Raccoons eat your cat's food, tip over your garbage, and if they can get their hands in your chicken coop they will pull your favorite hen through the wire in millions of tiny pieces. Also, they steal batteries they don't need, and their feet are strangely human.

According to the Center for Northern Woodlands Education, raccoons have hands that work almost like human hands, but they lack opposable thumbs so their hands don't actually look much like human hands. Still, they can use them for humanish tasks like washing food, pulling chickens through wire piece by piece, and giving your dog rabies.

Visually, though, the raccoon's feet are even more bizarre. From the bottom, they look almost exactly like human feet. Not sure why, exactly. It is true that raccoons are especially excellent at standing on their back legs, so maybe their feet are shaped that way so they'll have good balance when they become an army of back-leg-standing zombie raccoons like that one time in Ohio

According to Live Science, raccoons can also rotate their back feet 180 degrees. This helps them climb down vertical surfaces head first, which is not much like what human beings do with their back feet. Still, the human look does add to the whole "raccoons are super creepy" message that the species has been trying to forward for its entire existence, so maybe that's the only reason they need.

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