Raccoons Are Smarter Than Humans And We Should Finally Admit It

It’s a sad moment bordering on despair when you watch something you love fall to its knees—like seeing how terrible The Simpsons is these days.

That feeling I’m describing is one I felt watching a raccoon figure out how to get into this raccoon-proof garbage bin in Toronto. After some 30,000 years or so of pure, unadulterated dominance homo sapiens have finally been bested by another mammal—the wily trash panda.

This video, posted to Facebook by Graeme Boyce puts the nail in humanity’s coffin. It shows the raccoon proving once and for all they are smarter than humans by opening a supposedly “raccoon-proof” trash bin, which features a circular switch that locks on the lid. You have to twist the lock to get inside, but this wasn’t enough to stop this creature.

In his post, Boyce said that he was “minding his own business” when he heard a toboggan being thrown to the ground—something he set up as an “alert when the raccoon was atop the bins.” Then he got the video of the raccoon using its little paws to open the locking mechanism to get into that sweet, sweet trash inside.

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The raccoons have defeated our finest, most boring bureaucrats.

"We are ready, we are armed and we are motivated to show that we cannot be defeated by these critters," Toronto Mayor John Tory said as he unveiled the bin design in 2015. "I think people are with us on this one in wanting to make sure…we defeat raccoon nation."

“I told the raccoons this day would come,” he said a year later when we first saw them.

Well, joke is on you, John Tory, you got bested by the “raccoon nation.”

To put it bluntly, it's not just defeating the one trash puzzle we thought raccoons couldn’t solve that makes me worry about the raccoons. In recent years, the trash pandas have been in the news cycle constantly, whether for being zombified or riding majestically on garbage trucks, and I for one don’t think it’s just a coincidence—they’re planning something big.

And you know what, after seeing the hot mess humans have gotten themselves into lately, maybe it’s time to give raccoons a go.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.