This is too many raccoons.

My step-mother-in-law has been feeding the raccoons for years, a year or two ago they were a family that looked like this.

Now all of them have their own babies and it got to be a swarm of raccoons that fought each other and they are not afraid of people.

So she’s said she was going to stop feeding them, but they still show up, and she feeds the squirrels but really I’m pretty sure the raccoons are just eating the peanuts she puts out.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/raccoons-feeding-urban-wildlife-dangerous

Even if you think raccoons are cute, feeding them is not

While it may seem like you’re helping, feeding wild raccoons may be ensuring their untimely deaths, experts say.

Raccoons that become reliant on human food are more likely to spread disease, get hit by cars, and die when the deliveries end.

It’s great that people want to have a connection with raccoons,” says Jeannine Fleegle, a wildlife biologist with the Pennsylvania Game Commission. “I so get that. I so understand that. But there are problems.”

For starters, feeding wildlife can quickly lead to habituation, or what scientists call it when animals start to become a little too cozy with people. And while the people doing the feeding may interpret the animal’s tame behavior with affection, that can quickly turn to violence.

“You may be okay with that raccoon, but your neighbor may not be, and raccoons don’t know the difference. They’re just going to associate people with food, and that’s a bad thing,” says Fleegle. “They can become aggressive, especially with a small person or a child. They can get aggressive with pets.”

“Raccoons have a lot of diseases that we can get, and so can our pets,” says Fleegle. “The big one, of course, is rabies. Rabies is a killer… but there’s also parvovirus. There’s distemper. There’s roundworm. There’s leptospirosis. I mean, I could go on and on.”

People and their pets aren’t the only ones at risk, either. When humans feed wildlife, it encourages animals to congregate in higher numbers than they would do so in nature. And this makes it more likely that the animals will spread infectious diseases to each other.

“Fighting can lead to injuries. These situations are stressful to the animals whether we think so or not. And stress suppresses the immune system, opening the door for illness that might not have otherwise been an issue.”

Please do not give the raccoons a reason to wake you up like this every morning.

Stop feeding them.

The council greets you

Well, let them the fuck in! You know how cold it is outside?

They’re cute, any idea why so many?