It should go without saying, but you probably shouldn’t try to turn raccoons into pets. The little trash pandas tend to carry rabies and diseases that make them walk around like zombies, and they eat pretty much anything they can get their scratchy little paws on. This detail was an important lesson in pet ownership that one Indianapolis woman learned last week after her pet raccoon somehow ingested a bunch of marijuana and wound up stoned out of its mind.
According to local NBC affiliate WTHR, the woman, realizing that her domesticated raccoon was a little more lethargic than usual, frantically tried to get some help. Instead of alerting the local vet or whatever, she went down to the fire department at 2AM and started ringing the doorbell. When they opened up, they found the woman and her pet raccoon, blazed as hell, exhibiting symptoms of someone who’s “been exposed to marijuana,” Wayne Township Fire Capt. Mike Pruitt said.
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“The raccoon was very lethargic,” Pruitt told ABC affiliate RTV6. “She started explaining what had happened. There wasn’t really much we could do, it was just the sort of thing that was going to take time.”
While the firefighters tried to figure out how to handle the stoned raccoon, a team of dispatchers scrambled to help. Soon rumors started swirling on the radio that the critter might have overdosed on meth, or maybe heroin. Someone even suggested spraying the poor beast with Narcan before everyone decided the whole situation was just too bizarre to deal with.
Eventually, the firefighters gave up on trying to rouse the raccoon from his THC-induced coma, and sent him home to sleep it off. At the end of the day, the whole situation was a little more than the emergency services could handle. Fishing chubby raccoons out of sewer grates is really more their speed.
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