On my walk to work this morning, I saw a raccoon trotting calmly along the side of a busy road. I thought it was a cat at first until I got a closer look. I was a little alarmed, not being accustomed to seeing raccoons outside of dumpsters at night, and my first thought was “Rabies! Augh!” It noticed me about the same time I noticed it, and it looked similarly shocked. It stopped and stared at me, transfixed expression on its little bandit face, and then it scurried rapidly into a sewer drain. It poked its head out to look at me a little longer, terrified but curious, and I momentarily forgot about rabies and wished I had my camera to capture the cuteness.

The thing that struck me as odd, odder than a raccoon in daylight of course - it had not been fazed by the cars zooming past it in the slightest. Of course it kept to the side of the road, keeping the parked cars between it and the curb. It wasn’t until it saw Big Bad Me, the lone pedestrian, that it got spooked.

This guy is the closest one to looking like my raccoon on google image search.

I tried to play raccoon psychologist during the rest of the walk, and musing over the circumstances, maybe I can see why the raccoon would be more scared of cars than of people. I noticed this same behavior in Lily the beagle, a shelter dog adopted by E’s parents. Lily had spent some time wandering the streets before the beagle rescue had picked her up, and was known to be wary of people. We decided to take her for a walk through downtown, to help get her more accustomed to people, and that turned out to be an utter disaster. Any time a group of people approached, she would tremble and try to hide between my legs (tying me up with the leash in the process). The most troubling thing she tried to do was to run towards cars. Moving cars. E and I could not figure out how a dog like that could survive on the streets with such wrong instincts! It was a very lucky thing that she found a loving home.

The notion of cars vs. people reminds me of a short story or maybe a discussion I read once about how, if aliens landed on our planet now, they might mistakenly think that automobiles are the dominant species. We as humans, apparently the lesser species, fight wars to gather the necessary resources to appease our automotive masters. I wonder if the same idea could be applied to animals as well - do animals think of cars as big, strange, smelly animals that go really fast? And if they did think of cars as other animals, which species would they prefer to hang out with, cars or people?

Cars are deadly, sure. The first sign of spring’s arrival is the line of littered corpses along the mile markers on the highway. In a match-up between raccoon and car, even a teeny compact SmartCar, car wins. Raccoon vs. human? If the human is particularly out of shape or small, the outcome is a little more dubious.

Still, there are some reasons why my little raccoon acquaintance might be less uneasy around cars than humans.

1. Cars are predictable. For the most part, they stay on the roads. They tend to behave in a relatively orderly fashion - in cities, they will often move together in big clusters because of traffic light patterns. They move in straight lines and angles. There are obvious exceptions to this, of course (see: drunk drivers, the elderly) but on the whole, cars behave consistently.

Humans, should raccoons ever encounter them, are far less predictable. Sure, they provide food, but usually not willingly. Sometimes a human will be moved to chase the raccoons away from trash bins, or in more rural areas, shoot them with pellet guns. Friendly humans can come off as aggressive, approaching too closely to take photographs (blinding raccoons with flash bulbs). Very young humans, in particular, are prone to shrieking and chasing the raccoons in an attempt to pet them, which comes across as aggression. Which leads me to point two:

2. Cars are generally not aggressive. When a car hits an animal, it’s not intentional; aside from a handful of bored rednecks, most drivers don’t swerve to try and hit the animal. As long as the raccoon stays off the roadway, it’s safe. Humans are another story.

3. Parked cars can provide shelter. Once a car stops moving, it ceases to be a threat to the raccoon (aside from attracting scary humans, of course), and turns into a resource.

4. Cars are colorful and shiny. Raccoons are known to like shiny things.

After going through these reasons, I still think that raccoon was crazy (and possibly rabid). But it was still super cute!