They may look cuddly from a distance, but invasive raccoons in Germany are causing serious problems after their population exploded in recent decades.
Known as Waschbären, meaning ‘wash bears’, due to their habit of meticulously cleaning their food, the creatures have been linked to some serious crimes across the country.
Germans are advised to put grilles over their chimneys and lock cat flaps at night to stop them from invading their homes – and they’ve even been accused of killing and eating beloved family pets.
Last month, regional news website HNA reported that two young girls in the central city of Kassel had discovered the partial remains of their dwarf rabbit Lissy in their garden, with their parents saying raccoons had broken into the hutch.
Two weeks before, a woman in the same city had woken at 6am to find five raccoons in her rabbit enclosure, with one of her pets dead and a second hiding.
The news site quoted local pest control expert Frank Becker, who said: ‘Raccoons have been known to break into pens and kill rabbits. Also chickens.’
As well as breaking and entering, the animals have also been accused of becoming drunk and disorderly after developing a taste for German beer.
In a recent article headlined ‘The squatters with the Zorro mask’, newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine cited biologist Berthold Langenhorst who called them ‘funny and clever’, adding: ‘They like to drink beer.’
He recalled watching raccoons knocking over bottles to enjoy the contents while on a trip to a reservoir in the state of Hesse.
It was in northern Hesse that raccoons were first released into the wild in Germany, almost 90 years ago.
A likely apocryphal story places the responsibility for their introduction in 1934 at the feet of high-ranking Nazi and commander of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring, who was planning to move the headquarters of the air force to the area and wanted something to hunt locally.
With no natural predators to bring the numbers down, hunting the raccoon soon became more of a necessity than a hobby.
Those numbers continue to grow dramatically. In the 2000-01 season, Germany’s National Hunting Association (DJV) killed just over 9,000 raccoons.
Two decades later, they hunted more than 200,000 of them. In a recent report, the organisation warned: ‘Because of their highly sensitive sense of touch, they can learn to open complex closed things.’
Like in their natural home of North America, the animals have gravitated towards urban areas, and there are believed to be hundreds in Berlin.
Earlier this summer, the German Embassy in London tweeted a video of a raccoon stuck on a window sill at the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament.
A net is shown poking out a window to try and catch the creature, but it runs away – only to be met with another net poking out another window.
The embassy posted: ‘A surprise guest was spotted at the German Bundestag today, but the little raccoon (or Waschbär, as we say in German) couldn’t find its way out.
‘With a little help from colleagues, the cute visitor was brought safely back to nature.’
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