What is a raccoon dog?

Contrary to its name, a raccoon dog is not a raccoon. A member of the Canidae family — to which dogs also belong — its closest relative is a fox. It’s called a raccoon dog because its facial markings resemble that of the North American raccoon. “This isn’t a story about the raccoons in Americans’ backyards,” said Ellen P. Carlin, a veterinarian at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security who studies how animals transmit disease to people. The raccoon dog is native to East Asia, but it was introduced to Europe in the mid-20th century by the Soviet Union to bolster the fur trade. It is also considered a delicacy by some consumers in China, Carlin said. The small-to-midsize mammal has a varied diet, including insects, rodents, birds, fish, fruits, nuts and berries. Its eating habits — it is a scavenger like the raccoon — can make it more prone to picking up diseases in the wild, according to Krysten Schuler, a wildlife disease ecologist at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. The animal is also on the European Union’s list of invasive species of concern, which attempts to limit harmful species to native wildlife. “It is also a very important vector of rabies, parasitic worms, ticks, sarcoptic mange and other parasites and diseases dangerous for native wildlife, as well as for humans,” according to the E.U. report.

Can raccoon dogs spread disease to humans?

Raccoon dogs can spread tapeworms, rabies and other pathogens to humans by acting as intermediary hosts, which means they pick up the disease from another source before transmitting it to humans. A March 2022 study also found that raccoon dogs can harbor canine coronaviruses, which display some similarities to the coronavirus found in humans. Carlin noted that many similar-size animals in the wild can host infectious diseases. But, she said, many do not end up in situations where they could spread the disease to people. Humans’ actions have heightened that risk. Because raccoon dogs often are sold in wet markets that sell live animals, such as the one in Wuhan, stacked on top of one another close to animals they don’t normally interact with, there is more opportunity for them to pick up and transmit diseases. In general, there are three ways humans could contract a virus from raccoon dogs, Schuler and Carlin said. All of those are made more likely by them being sold in a wet market. The first is through handling their bodily fluids and then consequently touching one’s mouth, nose or eyes. In the process of slaughtering the animal, one could also inhale blood or other fluids. The third is through consumption. “When these animals are in those situations where they get stressed, they are more likely to shed virus,” Schuler said, noting that the cages can cause that stress. “They’re a bridge species that could cause the virus to adapt and be more likely to transmit to humans.”

Have raccoon dogs been linked to other outbreaks in humans?

Raccoon dogs could be implicated in the SARS outbreak of 2003, but researchers said it is not certain. One 2013 paper , Schuler said, reported that SARS-like coronaviruses were found in raccoon dogs at the time but that more research was needed to make the link conclusively. Outside of that, it is possible that raccoon dogs could have contracted a virus from another creature and passed it to a small number of humans, Carlin said. She was not aware of other pandemics that raccoon dogs could have been responsible for. “But it certainly wouldn’t surprise me that a raccoon dog could have harbored SARS-CoV-2,” Carlin said. “Given their capability of acting as intermediaries, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t have happened.”

clockThis article was published more than 1 year ago

Health

What to know about raccoon dogs, which may be linked to coronavirus’s origin

By Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff

March 17, 2023 at 6:02 p.m. EDT

A raccoon dog at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City in 2015. (Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images)

4 min

A raccoon dog has been linked to the long-running debate over the origins of the coronavirus after an international team of scientists reported that a sample taken in a Wuhan, China, market in early 2020 showed genetic traces of the virus and the animal. Scientists cautioned, though, that their finding does not definitively prove that raccoon dogs were the first source of the virus spreading to humans.

Here’s what you need to know about the furry creature that’s now at the center of the debate over the coronavirus’s mysterious origins.