Don't try this at home. We are semi-trained raccoon cuddling professionals. Also our raccoon is cuter than yours.
Background:
Smokey's mother broke into our roof and had a litter of two kits in June of 2011. We were planning to just wait for them to leave (which will happen once the kits are old enough) but the mother raccoon got in a fight with our neighbour's cat (required many stitches) so we decided to evict her. I removed a wall panel to gain access to a crawl space and pull out the two kits while the mother watched and growled disapprovingly from a short distance away (crawling into a confined dark space with an angry mother coon is definitely one of the scarier things I've done in my life).
We placed the kits outside near where the mother was entering our roof hoping she would take them somewhere else but she didn't. Therefore we decided to raise them. I had pet raccoons when I was a kid so this was not new to me. A couple weeks later one of the two kits became sick and died suddenly but Smokey was fine. We kept him indoors for a few months, then transitioned him to being an "outdoor coon". We live on a small hobby farm with lots of good coon habitat. Gradually we saw less and less of Smokey as he became independent. The last time we saw him was probably around 2014. The life expectancy of a raccoon in the "wild" is not very long so it's unlikely he's still around, but our hearts are hopeful every time we see a raccoon that resembles him.
