Raccoons are not native to Japan, yet in the last few decades, the furry critters have become naturalized in 44 of the country’s 47 prefectures, causing all sorts of problems for humans and other animal species. And to think it all started with a cute anime series…

In 1963, American writer Sterling North launched his most popular book, Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era. It told the story of a young boy called Sterling who went on adventures with his raccoon sidekick Rascal, and it became such a huge hit that Disney decided to turn it into a live-action movie. In Japan, Rascal’s adventures inspired a 52-episode anime series called Rascal the Raccoon (Araiguma Rasakaru), which ran for a year in 1977 and made raccoons the most sought-after pets in the country. There was just one problem – there were no raccoons in Japan, so people started importing them from the United States at a rate of about 1,500 raccoons per month.

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James Blackwood, a retired Mounted Police Officer from Nova Scotia, calls himself a “Raccoon Whisperer”, a worthy title, considering that he has been feeding dozens of them every night, for over two decades.

Blackwood and his furry friends recently became the talk of the interwebs, after a video showing the pensioner getting mobbed by a about two dozen raccoons, as he feeds them grapes and hot-dogs. This one video has been viewed 10 million times on YouTube, in the last two weeks, and has turned the retired RCMP officer into an overnight sensation. Truth be told, he already a healthy following on YouTube, with over 200,000subscribers, but those were mainly racoon and animal lovers, now the whole world knows about the Racoon Whisperer.

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A New York man has been dubbed the “Pied Piper of Raccons” after a video of him drawing almost two dozen furry critters from the woods with a Native American flute tune went viral online.

The popular video shows Eddy Lawrence playing his flute on the side of the road in Brasher State Forest, St Lawrence County, as dozens of raccoons emerge from the woods and form an audience around him. The otherwise shy creatures appeared mesmerized by the song, and according to the person who shot the video, around 20 of them had gathered around Lawrence by the time he finished playing. As the song ended, the spell it put on the raccoons seemed to break as well, as they scurried back into the forest.

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Police in Youngstown, Ohio, have received over a dozen reports of zombie-like raccoons coming out in the daytime, flashing their teeth and just falling on their backs for no apparent reason.

Youngstown has always had a raccoon population, but the furry mammals usually stayed out of people’s way, only coming out at night to search through their trash cans for food. However, last month, some of the raccoons started acting really strange. They would come out in broad daylight, sometimes walking up all the way to people’s front doors, flash their sharp teeth in a threatening manner and then fall on their back and enter a comatose-like state. Over the past three weeks, such raccoons came to be known as “zombie raccoons”.

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