Wild raccoons attacked Tokyo

A hotline has been opened in the capital of Japan so that local residents can more often report raccoons that spoil crops and enter houses. Over the past decade, their number has increased fivefold, and authorities fear they could cause serious damage to the country's ecosystem, The Guardian reports .

In response to the unprecedented attack, the Tokyo municipality began setting up traps in the west of the city - where the animals most often appear in the hilly areas - and asked local residents to actively report sightings of raccoons.

Local authorities face a difficult battle with the animal: they multiply quickly and also quickly adapt to an unfamiliar environment. By April 2023, trapping services had captured 1,282 raccoons. 10 years ago this figure was five times less - then they caught 259 individuals.

The damage caused by raccoons for fiscal 2022 was estimated at $2.8 million, as stated by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture. They also clarified that most often raccoons attacked livestock, vegetable gardens and orchards. The Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reported that raccoons prey on rare salamanders: authorities have already recognized the risk of their extinction as high, and control measures as insufficient.

“[We] often find the traps already broken; the raccoons are desperately fighting for their lives [and breaking them to get out]. We can’t even estimate the approximate number of animals, because we only manage to catch a small part,” city authorities told the newspaper.

The North American raccoon is not a species native to Japan. They were brought to the country in the 1970s as pets after the runaway success of the anime series Rascal the Raccoon. Most likely, they were either thrown out into the street, or they themselves ran away from their owners and adapted to the wild.

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