Wild pygmy raccoons have been filmed making and playing with pint-sized, papier-mâché footballs. The entrancing behaviour may be a rare example of wild animals making objects simply for fun.
Pygmy raccoons (Procyon pygmaeus) are found only on the Mexican island of Cozumel, where they live alongside flocks of visiting tourists. Nessie O’Neil from Miami University in Ohio spotted two young sisters performing the behaviour while researching the impact of tourism on these critically endangered mammals. “My initial reaction was Awww! Look how cute! They made a little ball!!!” she says.
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The first sister plucked a napkin and a receipt from a nearby waste bin. She dipped them in a bowl of water and pressed and then rolled them in the sand until they formed a little ball. She made eight balls over three days.
Many were then used for play. The sisters chased, rolled and batted them to each other with their forepaws. On one occasion, two juvenile dwarf coatis (Nasua narica nelsoni) – another pygmy island species - joined in the kickabout.
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The second sister seemed to learn from the first. Although her first four attempts at ball-making flopped, her fifth successfully repurposed a hamburger wrapper.
This isn’t ‘tool use’ because the balls had no practical purpose – they weren’t used to retrieve food, for example - but it is evidence of raccoons crafting and using objects for play. This is rare in the animal kingdom. Bottlenose dolphins, for example, have been observed creating bubble rings and playing with them.
Intriguingly, the behaviour wasn't seen at another beach club 30 kilometres away, despite the raccoons there having access to trash, water and sand. This raises the possibility that ball-making is a social learned local tradition.
The revelations, however, are bittersweet. For Cozumel’s raccoons, living alongside people comes at a heavy cost. Not long after she was filmed, the first sister became ill and died in rehabilitative care. Malnutrition and pollution were to blame. “It appeared to be mostly a combination of chemical spraying and construction runoff from a newly built beach club next door,” says O’Neil.
Tourists also feed the raccoons junk food and leave their scraps lying around. On one occasion, the sisters’ mother tried and failed to make a ball, ostensibly because she’d recently polished off a leftover margarita. “She stumbled about a bit.. flopped down… and laid there for about two hours while tourists fed her tortilla chips,” says O’Neil.
There are fewer than 200 pygmy raccoons left on Cozumel. Understanding how they pick up behaviours from one another could help conservationists steer them away from unhealthy interactions with tourists and back towards natural foraging.
In 2025 alone, Cozumel welcomed over 9 million tourists, about half arriving by cruise ship. “The goal,” says Cozumel municipal ecologist Noel Anselmo Rivas-Camo, “is to convey to the millions of annual visitors — and to the Cozumel community — that we possess a natural wealth which is gradually deteriorating, yet which we still have time to preserve.”
Video and image © Nessie O’Neil
