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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: 4, Informative) by Atatsu on Thursday April 05 2018, @01:30PM (2 children)
Summary eventually mentioned it but distemper immediately sprang to mind while reading the first bit. Growing up we'd always shoot racoons that behaved in such an odd fashion (and dispose of the body to hopefully prevent others from catching it)
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:07PM
Watch out, you might make more than Racoons' brains explode, if you go on explaining that weapons can be used to kill animals, but it's really for the good of the other pests around.
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Thursday April 05 2018, @04:52PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNR63VZ42Eo [youtube.com]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--