Yeah, no kidding. The iconic image of raccoons in my mind's eye is that of a raccoon sitting in the middle of my lawn with my trash strewn all over the place, staring me insolently in the eye, basically asking "Uh huh... what're you going to do about it, bub?"

And when I came back out with my 2 100 lb. dogs on a leash, the rest of the raccoon's pack (or family?) had joined him, and all 7 raccoons collectively shrugged & continued rooting around in my trash.

Assholes, every one of them.

Probably what they did before they decided to move into human suburbia. They're omnivorous carnivores, like bears.

When our city rolled out the new automated garbage trucks and replaced everyone's trash cans with 4' tall lidded bins, and made it a crime to set out garbage in anything other than these containers, it pretty much took care of the neighborhood's raccoon and crow issues.

They’ll learn; after a few years our city had to add a secondary locking mechanism because they had figured out how to pop the latch on the bin, knock it over and feast.

Only to be killed again with a misfire stunt gun

I don't know if it's a coincidence, but after West Nile wiped out the crows here in Illinois, a lot of predators started returning. My parents' block in suburban Chicago has foxes, a ton of coyotes, skunks, owls, hawks and I even spotted a bald eagle a little ways north of them. A few cougars have come through but they're exceedingly rare. None of those were around twenty years ago.

Who knows what biomes the crows control