Many Years Ago,

in the UK and I guess many other countries, there was a craze,

photograph Joshua J. Cotten/Unsplash, for turtles following the film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, kids bought terrapins as they are known in the UK and inevitably got tired of them, and disposed of them in the rivers and lakes of the UK, now a new imported pest is taking over in Japan, raccoons! In the last few decades, the furry, fun loving animals have become naturalized in 44 of the country’s 47 prefectures, causing all sorts of problems for humans and other animal species, it all started way back in 1963, when American writer Sterling North launched his most popular book, Rascal: A Memoirof 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 Rasukaru), which ran for a year in 1977 and made raccoons, (Procyon lotor), the most sought-after pets in the country,

and that is where it all went mustang, there were no raccoons in Japan, so what to do? Import them of course! At the height of the craze some 1,500 raccoons were imported a month from the US, by the time authorities realized what was going on and started preventing people to stop releasing their raccoons in the wild, it was already too late, apparently left unchecked the animals breed like rabbits, their behaviour I guess was the same as the US. In cities, they started going through the trash in search of food, even attacking people who got between them and their trash, and just being a natural nuisance, in an attempt to keep raccoons from destroying agricultural crops, traditional wooden temples, and houses, some Japanese prefectures have taken the controversial decision to cull the animals, but naturally the animal rights activists soon put a stop to that, all of this begs the question what will filmmakers make a cute creature of next? Still I guess we should take comfort in that not many people had an aquarium large enough for when the film Free Willy was released!