Claim:
In 2025, a University of Arkansas at Little Rock study found that raccoons from urban environments have begun to show signs of domestication.
Rating:
Context
Researchers compared thousands of images of raccoons from iNaturalist, a website where users post images of flora and fauna, based on location. They found that raccoons photographed in urban areas in North America showed a reduction in snout length compared with those in rural areas. Reduced snout length is typical of what scientists call “domestication syndrome,” a set of traits shared by domesticated animals.
Since at least November 2025, a rumor has circulated online claiming that a study found signs of domestication in common raccoons (scientific name Procyon lotor) living in urban areas.
The rumor circulated on social media sites such as Facebook (archived) and Threads (archived). One X post (archived) went into more detail about what the study found:
A new study has shown that Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication. The University of Arkansas found that urban raccoons have smaller snouts, a sign of domestication syndrome.
A new study has shown that Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication
The University of Arkansas found that urban raccoons have smaller snouts, a sign of domestication syndrome pic.twitter.com/HAQODDbNk3
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) November 17, 2025
The social media posts pointed toward a paper, “Tracking domestication signals across populations of North American raccoons (Procyon lotor) via citizen science-driven image repositories,” published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Zoology. In the study, researchers from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock compared thousands of images of raccoons from a public database, finding that raccoons in urban areas across North America had a notable reduction in snout length that they attributed to early domestication — more on this below. As such, we have rated the claim as true.
What qualifies as domestication?
Many people associate the idea of domestication with humans influencing animals into becoming friendly or even household pets, but the actual meaning of the term is much more broad. According to the Frontiers in Zoology paper, “the process of domestication across species starts with the adaptation of a subpopulation to a new environmental niche in the human environment.”
Any adaptation related to a human environment could thus considered part of early domestication, and animals are able to start this change without direct intervention from humans, similar to how cats are said to have domesticated themselves.
The raccoon study explained that domestication in an urban environment requires adapting to human intervention, and that the most successful animals have a dampened fight-or-flight response in order to better scavenge in heavily trafficked areas, for example.
The paper explores the concept of “domestication syndrome,” a set of patterns and traits present in all domesticated animals. The syndrome is thought to arise due to a deficiency in a particular type of stem cell, “neural crest cells,” caused by “passive selection” for increased tameness.
The hypothesis researchers tested in the paper was that raccoons in urban areas have gone through natural selection to get accustomed to living with humans, and that these raccoons should start to show traits — such as decreased snout length — typical of domestication syndrome.
The survey of snout lengths revealed that raccoons in urban areas did have shorter snouts, and thus showed signs of early domestication.
Potential issues with methodology
The survey of snout lengths was conducted using images from iNaturalist, a website where users can upload images of plants and animals, and researchers compared the lengths of rural and urban raccoons’ snouts based on the locations listed on the posts. There was no actual field study or physical investigation of raccoons in urban or rural areas.
The paper also acknowledged the fact that raccoon snout length was not exclusively related to geographical location — there also was a correlation between snout length and the temperature of the climate the raccoon lived in. Some of the differences between raccoons in urban or rural environments could have been exaggerated by the effects of the climate or other variables.
For further reading, Snopes investigated the claim that humans originally domesticated pigeons to be companions and prized possessions, and now pigeons cannot survive without humans.
