What if we got rid of all the pesky raccoons? Much scarier things, expert says

They move like low, round shadows in the night.

They are almost silent. But should you ever see one, you’ll also hear its silky, secret footfalls on the darkened city streets.

They demolish garbage cans. And when we invent a better one, they think up all-new ways to trash our trash.

They even wear cute little bandit masks, as if to say “Yeah, we know we’re thieves, but what are you going to do about it?”

Raccoons. Sigh.

Astonishingly clever, these big, persistent eaters of everything. Business is good for them. You almost never see a skinny one.

But what if they weren’t here anymore? What if all the raccoons simply vanished, and you never again had to deal with shredded garbage at dawn?

“Removing a mesopredator (raccoons are officially classified as mid-sized predators) from an ecosystem can have lots of unintended consequences,” Dr. Suzanne MacDonald, raccoon expert and psychology professor at York University, tells Yahoo News.

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“Raccoons prey on rodents, so there would be a population surge in rats and mice, and there would also be more insects, as raccoons eat those, too. Raccoons also distribute seed from all the foraging they do. Seeds are caught on their fur and distributed, and they also poop out seeds from plants that they’ve eaten. Without raccoons, those plants wouldn’t propagate normally.”

She also warns that other opportunistic beasties would jump right in.

“We would likely see an increase in the feral cat population – as well as more coyotes.”

MacDonald – an enthusiastic fan and supporter of raccoons – argues that humans have largely created our own raccoon problem. We build our towns and cities on raccoon turf, and then give these very clever animal increasingly complex puzzles to solve.

“I’ve compared the urban vs. rural varieties of raccoons, and have found that the urban ones are much more persistent and will spend more time trying to figure out a problem, such as how to get into your garbage cans. They can afford to spend extra time, energetically, because they don’t have to travel so far to find food. Most urban raccoons spend their entire lives in a few square blocks of the city.”

She adds that intelligence tests have found raccoons are smarter than dogs, and more comparable to monkeys – even small children.

“What we have going on in our urban environments is an evolutionary arms race,” MacDonald says.

“Humans build more and more secure buildings and garbage cans and garage doors, and so raccoons have to get smarter and smarter to figure out how to exploit those resources. Those that don’t figure it out will not survive; those that do, will. It’s my hypothesis that this results in significantly smarter raccoons in urban environments than in their traditional rural ecosystems.

MacDonald is one human being who does not – in any way – want to banish raccoons from cities, towns or the world in general.

“No species needs a reason to exist,” she says. “They just do – and they were here first. We and our giant brains made the cities that they live in, and our giant brains should be capable of figuring out how to co-exist with all the species that have managed to adapt to our artificially created worlds.”