We were always warned against feeding wildlife. Cautions about them becoming too comfortable with human interaction creating dangerous situations and the animals becoming too dependent on people providing them food interfering with their natural instincts. This is why it’s discouraged for people to adopt wild animals as pets unless they’re injured to the point of never being able to return to the wild.
Even with this information being fairly common knowledge, it doesn’t always stop people from wanting to try their hand at becoming Princess Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. People commonly feed the squirrels, birds and deer local to their backyards without much second thought.
This normalizing of feeding certain wild critters also regularly includes people feeding raccoons , maybe in an effort to keep them out of their trash or maybe because the little trash bandits look that chubby cats with hands. Either way, this can quickly escalate either immediately or years after the fact as one Washington woman recently discovered.