And yes, I learned about it from the popular “casual geographic” tuber. But given my involvement with bears, I also have a soft spot in my heart for raccoons. And this lady (and more importantly this species!) deserve more recognition!
There’s only about 250 left in the wild and, despite having tons of available funding, Mexico is not publicly funding any conservation for them.
From what I read in the 10 minutes I was interested in it, it seems like the people who spend way more time on that than us aren’t 100% sure that they are a distinct species and only came to that conclusion fairly recently. I like raccoons in general, so I would like to see that distinct family of raccoons protected. I’m not going to argue much that they aren’t a distinct species. They do apparently have a different number of teeth now than their mainland kin. Mountain folk have a different number of teeth than city folk too, but that doesn’t make them extrahuman.