Urban raccoons are smarter than rural raccoons

City raccoons are smart. I wonder if something similar happens to humans? Does this explain why technological advance sped up after the first cities were formed?

Unlike many animals, raccoons “flourished rather than receded in the face of human expansion,” Pettit points out in an article for the American Psychological Association.1 Part of the reason for their success may be that the urban environment has contributed to their intelligence. In humans, the effect is well known. Educational psychologist Walkiria Fontes has compared the cognitive abilities of rural and urban children on two metrics: crystallized intelligence, which is associated with experience, and fluid intelligence, which is the ability to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge. She found that urban rich kids have the edge with both kinds of intelligence. But even poor urban students scored better than poor rural students in fluid intelligence.

City raccoons also appear smarter than their rural counterparts. Suzanne MacDonald, a comparative psychologist who studies raccoon behavior at York University in Toronto, has compared the problem-solving skills of rural and city raccoons. The result? Urbanites trump their country cousins in both intelligence and ability. For the past few summers, she videotaped rural and urban racoons toying with containers baited with cat food. While both rural and city racoons readily approached familiar containers, they dealt differently with unfamiliar ones. Where rural raccoons took a long time to approach novel containers, city raccoons would attack them the moment she turned her back.

One particularly persistent urban raccoon even learned to open doors leading into MacDonald’s garage, where she keeps her garbage bins. It stood up on an overturned flowerpot, and kept pulling and pushing on the round knob of the door handle with its five-digit paws until it turned. “Normally, they can’t do that, they can’t grasp and turn things very easily,” MacDonald says. “Raccoons in the city are extraordinary, not only in their ability to approach things, but they have no fear, and they stick with it, they will spend hours trying to get food out of something.”

Treadwell also noted how quickly his subjects learned. “They do go around trying systematically different things around that bin, they play until something moves and then they keep working at that,” Treadwell says.

The city itself may be partly to blame. “Cities are machines for learning. They offer a maelstrom of activities,” says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City. “I’m sure it must be for animals as well, a range of possibilities to learn from and learn about.” Cities might have proved particularly beneficial to raccoons because of their innate boldness. MacDonald says bold and curious animals like racoons make good learners. The connection between boldness and learning has also been observed in other animals. Lynne Sneddon of the University of Liverpool, for example, found that bold rainbow trout learn better and more quickly than shy ones.