Raffaela Lesch

Cats seem to have been attracted to human settlements because our trash had a lot of rodents around.

And that was basically like an easy buffet, you know, like there's so much food that you can hunt down.

Rafaela says that raccoons may be following in their footsteps.

So in a scientific context, what we wanted to answer was, does urbanization or an urban environment potentially kickstart a domestication event in raccoons?

And really that was going to be that first look at, is there any potential, any more potential in that question?

Is it worth to invest more time and funding and money into looking into this in more detail?

And on the more class and personal level, we also wanted to address that just from our own sense of curiosity.

And I had basically created this framework from the start.

So they knew that we were going to work on the domestication syndrome and urbanization.

And then I introduced them to the whole scientific context, the theoretical background of

And that's really where we then started working on the actual research question, data collection, data analysis, and all that.

Yeah.

So there's two parts to that answer.

So if we tackle that domestication syndrome first, domestication syndrome really describes traits that we see across domesticated animals.

So

For example, smaller brains, floppy ears, curled tails, shorter snouts, and kind of like a white patching or white depigmentation showing up across the body.

So all of these traits we refer to as domestication syndrome.

And as I said, it occurs across all domesticated animals, but not every single trait shows up all the time.

So we might see a snout reduction in dogs, but that might not be present in cats.

White patches seems to be one of the most ubiquitous.