Adorable Raccoon Sits Like Human As He Eats His Favorite Fruit Snack

Nov 26, 2020

Back in September this year, a six-year-old raccoon from South Korea captured hearts when a video of him eating grapes from a jar while sitting upright circulated the Internet.

Some people find raccoons to be a nuisance while others find them utterly adorable. No matter which camp you belong to, one thing is for sure — these masked bandits have pretty impressive skills.

Here are some raccoon facts, or superpowers, according to National Geographic, that you may not have known about:

• They have a super sense. According to National Geographic, these mammals have four to five times more sensory cells in their paws as compared to most others, with a whopping 75% of the part of their brain that processes sensory signals dedicated just to their sense of touch. Move over, Peter Parker. "They can get an image of what an object is without even looking at it, so the raccoons actually see with their hands," said psychology professor at York University and National Geographic Society Explorer, Suzanne MacDonald. Move over, Peter Parker.
   
• Their burglar mask doesn’t just make them Halloween-ready 24/7, it’s how they identify each other, according to MacDonald.

• They are great teachers. As seen in this video posted in 2015, a raccoon mom was found teaching her youngster to climb a tree and even repositioning her kit on the tree several times. Like any mom, she also made sure her baby didn’t fall.
   
• And if it’s not clear by now, raccoons are insanely clever (for a four-legged creature). A study in 2017 suggests that just like crows, raccoons are also capable of figuring out the Aesop’s Fable test. Researchers demonstrated dropping stones into the vessel to raise the water level, and two out of eight of the raccoons tested repeated the action. A third raccoon who did not follow the action managed to retrieve the marshmallow anyway — he went for the toppling-the-cylinder-over method to attain the sweet treat.

• Raccoons are adaptable. MacDonald conducted a test to see how the changing of raccoon’s natural habitats have affected their way of finding food. She conducted a test by placing cat food in the bottom of a covered trash can, and when the animals caught a whiff of the aroma, she found that the rural raccoons would go to the bottom of the trash can while the urban raccoons went for the trash can lid. "We’re constantly making new garbage cans and new locks, and if they want to survive, they have to figure out our stuff," MacDonald told the magazine in 2014.

One raccoon named BuriBuri from South Korea shows us one little-known skill that a raccoon can possess: Eating grapes from a jar while sitting upright on a couch. Yeah, we know it’s specific but we’d like to see a groundhog do an attempt on that.

According to his bio on Instagram, BuriBuri is the youngest member in a family of six (family of humans or raccoons is unclear, but not really important). He is six years old and stands at a height of 55cm (21.6 inches) and weighs 13.6kg (almost 30 pounds). BuriBuri is pretty active on the social media site, posting pictures and videos daily, sometimes even multiple times in a day! As of this writing, the little critter has more than 38,400 followers.

Unlike most raccoons, BuriBuri is extremely domesticated. He sleeps with a pillow and a duvet, gets dressed up in people's clothing like dresses and suits, and even displays grouchiness from having to wake up in the morning.

In a video of him shared by Rumble Viral back in September, BuriBuri is seen enjoying his jar of grapes, grabbing them from the container without even needing to look at where his paws are going. As the video goes on, we see that one of his humans would give him red grapes in between his breaks from eating the jar of green ones. We then see him scrambling just a little when he realizes that he has emptied the jar.

The whole video is just about two minutes long with not much going on but the eating, yet netizens have much to say about it. One viewer talked about how relaxing the experience was to watch, saying, “I cannot explain this, but watching a raccoon eat grapes is so therapeutic for me!” Another commented on his impressive motor skills, writing: “If he had the brain of a human, there's no telling what he could do with those hands.”

Watch this fluffy boy living his best life with grapes in the video below!

Do you know any funny or adorable raccoon stories? Let us know in the comments below. If this makes you want to get a raccoon, pass it along to your loved ones to convince them to let you get one!