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Local cops have responded to more than a dozen calls of raccoons acting "extremely strange."
[...] This March, residents of Youngstown, Ohio, began noticing something weird about their local raccoon population. The animals were coming out during the day and standing on their back legs, bearing their teeth and staggering around like extras in a George Romero movie, WKBN reports.
"[The raccoon] would stand up on his hind legs, which I've never seen a raccoon do before, and he would show his teeth and then he would fall over backward and go into almost a comatose condition," Robert Coggeshall, who was walking his dogs when he spotted the raccoon in question, told WKBN. Eventually, the raccoon would shake itself out of the daze, rise back up to its hind legs, and stagger forward, before repeating the whole process over again. It was, to put it in Coggeshall's words, "extremely strange."
[...] No one is certain exactly what is causing the weird-ass behavior, but the Ohio Department of Natural Resources says the raccoons may be suffering from a disease called distemper, rather than rabies.
'Zombie Raccoons' Are Traumatizing an Ohio Town
(Score: 5, Interesting) by nimbius on Thursday April 05 2018, @01:02PM (13 children)
Many rodents and nuisance animals can become exposed to waste chemicals through illegal dumping or indirectly through other pest control vectors. For example, epileptic opossums may not have come into direct contact with pesticides, however after gorging on dead cabbage palm caterpillars from a treated nearby farm, many of the animals would exhibit this type of neurological disorder.
the bipedal kinematics, stupor, and aggression response seems to indicate potential exposure to Methanol, Formaldehyde, or perhaps ethenylbenzene. Many solvents can cause this type of unpredictable behavior as well. Since Raccoons use burrows or hollowed logs for habitat, My hypothesis is that the released chemical was a heavy gas.
disclosure: i worked for the US forest service during college.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday April 05 2018, @01:20PM
Would need to be kind of a lot of heavy gas and a severe lack of wind, no?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @01:23PM (6 children)
I hate every idiots these days who think they need to write "disclosure" on every frickin' post. Disclosures are meant to point to a possible conflict of interest, not "hey guys, I have some experience in this area."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @01:30PM (3 children)
Considering your grammar is sub-par, you are not in a position to complain.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:00PM (2 children)
Man, there's no need to go talking bad about someone's grammar. I mean ad hom's one thing but stick to the feller posting not little old ladies who ain't here to defend themselves.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:34PM (1 child)
Ya ya little old ladies are YOU turf we GET IT already.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:17PM
Damned right. They know cakes and pies and cookies and biscuits and shit like nobody's business. Plus they know all of the tricks that ever been tried in the sack.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:56PM
I hate every idiot that hides their conflicts of interest so they can portray themselves as having expertise without being truthful about where their experience and paychecks come from.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 06 2018, @09:23AM
Wow. It's the first time I've noticed it, and I only noticed it because you so rudely drew my attention to it. When I read it, I simply interpreted it as "for those who are wondering what credentials I have that permit me to be so specific", but using one word rather than many, which would be a positive thing. And of course, if the agency he worked for has any bias, justified or not, which might make them unusually likely to draw particular conclusions (such as being an enemy of the petrochemical industry), then "disclaimer" would be entirely appropriate.
Disclaimer: I'm old enough to have studied "rhetoric" at school, love a good shitpost, and have asbestos underpants.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:26PM
Hey. ThAt is my cake recipe!
Would yoU like some cake?
- GlaDOS
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @03:33PM
I know there is a TON of fracking on the east side of Ohio. I wonder if there is a bunch up there in Youngstown and the groundwater is contaminated?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 05 2018, @08:09PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 06 2018, @09:32AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 06 2018, @12:21PM
Yes. There are actually other videos of distemper-affected raccoons on the internet too. And some show the same "rearing up" symptom.