I was up at 4 am, it was dark and I went out on my porch to read. A raccoon, coming out of the dark, slowly strolled right in front of my chair. He didn’t know I was there. He looked up, saw me, froze, stared and then slowly turned around and pranced away. His odd walking style amazed me.
I have seen lots of raccoons walking. I had a huge walk-in cage in my back yard where I raised several raccoons as a kid. I use to take the young raccoons for walks around my neighborhood — their funny stroll made people laugh. Raccoons are very bright animals, but you can tell by their awkward gait that they are tree animals and not naturally meant to be wanderers on open plains.
This morning’s raccoon encounter bounced my morning revery into thinking about the similarity between the unnatural gallop of the raccoon and how awkward humans are when they think. It is as if humans don’t naturally belong to the “thinking animals” category. I can’t imagine a raccoon sprinting like cheetahs, nor a human thinking objectively. But we both keep trying !
