Hannah Griebling

So that behavior could really benefit them in urban environments where there are all these problems to solve, because the more problems you learn to solve, then potentially the more access to resources you have.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, certainly we're still trying to figure out, you know, which came first, the city or the raccoon, right?

So we know raccoons have been associated with urban environments kind of as long as they've been around in North America.

So we're still trying to answer the question of...

Are they doing these things in their natural environment and then they're just adapting?

Or are cities actually selecting for these cognitive traits?

So are, you know, raccoons able to come into cities and live in cities so well because they have these cognitive traits?

Or are the cities shaping these cognitive traits?

So that's a question we don't really have an answer to yet, but stay tuned.

Hopefully we will someday.

Sure.

Yeah, they definitely are well habituated, especially in a lot of a lot of cities.

You are talking to a horse girl.

So if we want to talk about the comparison between horses and raccoons, we can go there.

But I don't think that was your point.

Yeah, yeah.

So we do think that raccoons are what we call neophilic.

So they have a really strong attraction to novelty.