Reddit reviews Peterson Reference Guide to the Behavior of North American Mammals (Peterson Reference Guides)

That's a myth, man. If you look down these comments, I put a longer explanation of it down (all the swearing and such in it are because there was somebody being a total douche)

Edit: here it is, straight copy and paste. Ignore the swearing, it was to somebody else. Also, I had a raccoon that's a bit of a mascot at work licking peanut butter suet off my fingers, he definitely had saliva.

"You really are a bitter, miserable person belligerent at everybody for no fucking reason, aren't you? Has it ever occurred to you to make your points in a way that doesn't make you seem like an utter twat and maybe, just maybe, have a rational discussion?

I doubt you'll listen to this at all as it's just my word that I read in a text in a course and lectured on it by the professor of that course (Wildlife Management at Ohio State.) But I don't really care, maybe somebody else on the thread will find this interesting. I'm far from an expert, I can only say what I learned in college and on the job. And I will say, I thought this was a recent thing to be researched and watched but it's not at all so I guess I can thank your boorishness for that.

The idea that they have inadequate saliva glands was a hypothesis from a rather influential, if controversial, French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc in the 1770's. But starting about 1979 (from what I can tell) it seems a substantial portion of naturalists and wild life researchers that write and work on Wildlife (especially in the United States, Germany and Japan) were coming to see it another way. It comes down to their paws.

I read this one in college https://www.amazon.com/Peterson-Reference-Behavior-American-Mammals/dp/0618883452 which in the raccoon section talks extensively about how raccoon's paw pads are one of their most important sensory organs and how they use it to judge what they're about to eat. They do this pad handling and rubbing no matter what, as you can find plenty of videos and pictures of them doing it nowhere near water (want links? I found some from just crazy people hand feeding in their back yard, some wildlife trap cams and some articles and a video from Smithsonian sites and NatGeo.) Why they seem to do it most in the water, while yes they will use it as an opportunity to brush off excess rubbish (but will happily eat garbage anyways when nowhere near water) is that the flesh of their pads will become more sensitive and pliant in water, allowing them to feel what they're about to shove up their gob even more so and judge best they can if it's really something edible.

Seriously though, this is a super low hanging fruit. You accuse me of just skimming a single article but if you actually do any kind of search, whether just a quick google/wikipedia (which has a whole slew of credible references about this exact thing btw) looked on sites like the smithsonian, or find a book on it you'll see that a good number of people in wildlife communities consider this a mistaken hypothesis that became a myth. I found a 50 minute video of a lady continually feeding a pair dry kibble and they went to town on it like the fat trash pandas they are, no problems with saliva not letting them eat. So scientific consensus is in fact not at all what you said and that you're also a cunt.

Edit: Forgot to mention when saying it's not as recent as I thought. The first wildlife studies that I could find in old text book references and online is from 1979, a study piece titled "Procyon lotor" credited to Lotze, J.-H. and S. Anderson."