I was sitting in my parent’s kitchen last weekend when through the window, we noticed a big old raccoon come out of the weeds and into our yard. It sat in the snow, all fluffy and scratching around with its little paws, as raccoons do. They’re terribly cute animals, and that’s just the trouble. On our farm, raccoons are bad news. They’ve eaten our chickens, terrorized our ducks. It’s hard to believe it when you see them, but as this one lumbered around in the dark, we knew. The chicken house was just up the hill. We all shared this look. And then my father went up to the closet and took out a rifle. He went outside, took aim and fired.

It's an awful thing. It’s harsh, unforgiving. I grew up with the practice, it’s part of the endless struggle to keep our domesticated animals safe. But it’s never easy. When I came back to the city, I did not tell my roommates about it. One of them is vegetarian, not a fan of dead animals. Plus these days, everybody loves raccoons.

I know that’s a weird sentence, but raccoons are having a moment in popular culture right now. Videos of them are all over TikTok, and there’s a few raccoons in particular who are routinely viral. They’re pets, one of them is named Tito, and their owner gives them snacks to try, which they crunch on in front of the camera. I’ve only seen a few of these videos, but they rack up millions of views and thousands of comments exclaiming over the cuteness.

Tito came to mind when I saw that raccoon out the window. There are people in the world who choose to love raccoons the way we love our chickens, our goats. It makes me wonder if we’ll always value our farm animals over wildlife, especially when these kinds of unconventional pets are becoming more and more popular by the day.

Even this year’s Best Picture winner at the Oscars, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, features a raccoon. The movie takes a lot from TikTok: the absurdism, the lightning-fast pace, the little nuggets of humor strung together like a series of memes. One of those humorous moments involves a chef with a raccoon clinging to his hair (a reference to Disney Pixar’s Ratatouille where a chef is controlled by a rat perched on his head). It’s very funny.

I find it interesting that our attitude towards animals is always in flux. Maybe several centuries from now, we’ll all have raccoons in the house. Or maybe we’ll have figured out a way to communicate with animals, really talk to them, and all our old ways will seem barbaric. We’re always doing that, making discoveries, looking back with a cringe and then changing our ways.

These are the kinds of things that run through my head when a raccoon shows up in the yard. It’s a very strange tangent to take you all down, I know. I’m glad my chickens are safe, but it’s always sad to see a raccoon go.