Hello.

My name Catie Wayne.

Welcome to "Weird, Gross, and Beautiful,"

a casual discussion about all different kinds

of animals that I think are weird, gross, beautiful

or all three.

We're talking about raccoons today.

Can you handle it?

I can't handle it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Raccoons.

[SHRIEKING]

Aw, missed.

So cute.

Raccoons, the have these adorable little black finger

paws.

And they're dexterous.

And that's why they're so super good at undoing latches

and getting in your stuff.

Their most heightened sense is their sense of touch,

even more so in the water, which is kind of bizarre.

So when they can, they will examine stuff underwater

with their little, tiny finger paws.

And it's so cute.

They're so beautiful.

They're just adorable little bandits.

Did you guys enjoy that joke that's never been done before?

They are exceptional swimmers.

It just never occurred to me that they

would be good swimmers.

But they don't have waterproof fur.

So it makes them a lot heavier.

So I don't really think that they do it that often,

but they can.

That, that's beautiful.

Raccoons, they don't hibernate, which is odd to me.

It's weird.

It's weird to me.

They kind of seem like little bears with fuzzy tails,

but more like squirrels.

But squirrels don't hibernate either.

But chipmunks do.

So the tails, right?

The floofy loofy, floofa loofa loofa stripey tail,

that makes up to 52% of their body length.

And that is just so cut to me.

It's just so beautiful to me.

But as cute as these creatures are, as beautiful

as these creatures are, they do carry lots of diseases.

The most dangerous of which being something

called raccoon roundworm.

And it can cause blindness and even death in humans.

And that's no good, no fun, no fun at all.

But more commonly, they have things like rabies.

And signs of rabies are like a sickly appearance

or aggression, growling.

And if you see a raccoon like that, don't go near it

and don't touch it.

Don't do that because that's how they give you

rabies is they bite you.

That almost happened to me once on accident.

I saw a raccoon in my tree.

And then it skidded away.

And I didn't know where it went to.

And I went to go check my mailbox.

And I guess it went into the sewer by my mailbox.

And it growled at me.

It sound like a goddamn Saint Bernard.

Raccoons, they don't typically live that long.

Their typical life expectancy is two to three years.

But in captivity, they can live into their 20s.

That's a really significant difference.

They're super good, awesome, agile climbers.

And they climb up trees.

And they can climb down trees.

But they're really good at climbing down

because their feetsies, they go like this.

They do a whole 180 turn thing with their leg.

That's so gross.

Thank you so much for watching "Weird, Gross, and Beautiful."

And if you want to, you could subscribe

because that would be awesome.

And what else you could do is you could--oops.

If you want to, you could follow me on Twitter

so that you could tell me what animal you

want me to talk about.

Raccoons were suggested to me by Jelly.

So Jelly, you're welcome.

Mwah!

And if you also wanted to, you could check me out

on "Animalist News" because I do like three videos

a week over there.

Now you've just got so many options, man.

I love you so much.

And I'll see you next week.

Bye.

Mwah!

[ANIMAL SOUNDS]