Raccoons May Thrive in Our Backyards Due to Their Insatiable Curiosity and Love for Puzzles

Urban environments provide a great playground, at least for non-human city dwellers like raccoons. Cities provide a unique stage, allowing animals to grow through challenges and then be rewarded with new resources. It has been theorized that they improve their problem-solving abilities through curiosity alone.

To test this theory, researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) subjected raccoons to a multi-level puzzle box and found that they would continue to explore and solve the opening mechanisms long after they retrieved the small food reward. This shows that raccoons may not be motivated solely by instant reward, but may also possess genuine curiosity. The observations, published in Animal behaviorhighlight raccoons’ intrinsic motivation to collect knowledge, which researchers describe as “information seeking.”

Studies like this demonstrate how animals can adapt to complex human-made environments by prioritizing problem-solving skills and can also help us better manage how we coexist peacefully with curious creatures.

Learn more: Bonobo Kanzi plays pretend as a child, demonstrating the monkey’s capacity for imagination

Exploration continued after receiving the treat

The experiments used a custom-made plexiglass box with nine entry mechanisms, categorized as easy, medium and hard, including different types of latches, sliding doors, buttons and locks. The raccoons – captive animals at a Colorado research center – were given 20 minutes to retrieve a small marshmallow, and the researchers recorded and then evaluated the animals’ problem-solving strategies.

Interestingly, the raccoons often continued to explore the different opening mechanisms even after eating the reward, without being offered more treats, which the scientists interpreted as a clear sign of information seeking. It is important to note that the raccoons were fed just before the experiments, to ensure that their actions were not entirely driven by hunger.

“We didn’t expect them to find all three solutions in one trial,” Hannah Griebling, first author of the study and a researcher at UBC, said in a news release. “They continued to solve the problems even though there was no marshmallow at the end.”

Weigh risks like humans

The research team found that when the raccoons first encountered and solved the easy-to-open puzzles, they continued to explore other mechanisms. But when they completed more difficult tasks, they returned to puzzles they had already solved. Yet the exploratory attitude was consistent, regardless of the level of difficulty they faced.

According to the researchers, this pattern indicates flexible problem-solving skills, balancing curiosity against effort or risk, similar to decision-making strategies seen in other animals and humans.

“It’s a familiar pattern to anyone who orders at a restaurant,” Griebling said. “Do you order your favorite meal or try something new? If the risk is high – an expensive meal you might not like – you choose the safe option. Raccoons explore when the cost is low and quickly decide to play it safe when the stakes are higher.”

Adapted to human spaces

These results help explain why raccoons do so well in urban environments that require a certain level of cognition and physical skills to thrive. The forelegs of raccoons, which originally evolved to feed in water, have the appropriate sensory configuration to interact with latches and buttons invented by humans.

By expanding their interest beyond simply foraging, gathering information through their curiosity gives them the upper hand in complex human environments that are often designed to keep animals out of our spaces.

Learning from raccoons’ success could also help manage other species struggling with urban expansion and “inform the strategies of other species, like bears, that use problem solving to access human-created resources,” Griebling said.

“The intelligence of raccoons has long been a part of folklore, but scientific research into their cognition remains limited. Studies like this provide empirical evidence to support this reputation,” study leader Sarah Benson-Amram added in the press release.

Learn more: Are raccoons living in trash becoming the next pet?

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