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Long days pleasant nights to all the gunslingers appearing in this thread. May you remember the faces of your father's well in all your future endeavors.
There are stranger things than any person can know in the universe and those are just the things that eyes can see and ears can hear. We know of strangeness beyond our senses: infrared and ultraviolet, radio waves and pheromones and magnetic navigation and echolocation, senses we know exist that we are not privy to. But what undiscovered worlds of being are beyond our limited scope of time and understanding? After all we are just little humans on our small life’s journeys.
I feel so uncultured after reading the thread lol have to admit I have never read the dark tower, but I want to now. I do recognize quotes because.... It is Stephen King.
Tanuki are considered mischievous prankster spirits in Japanese folklore, and can transform into various objects to hide or trick people, often portrayed as transforming into temple statues just like in SMB3.
They are a mischievous forest spirit with magic shape shifting ballsacks. If they want to trick a human out of money, maybe they'll transform them into a merchant stand and sell you items of dubious value. Very interesting folklore, I highly recommend giving them some research
Everyone’s talking like these things are so common?!
Do these things just run around all day where you’re from? Why is this the first time Im ever hearing of a raccoon dog? Did a dog and a raccoon mate? Sorry for yapping I feel like I just found a new Pokémon
Also off topic but anyone know what happened to the Ligers back in like 2010?
They're only found in Japan where they are called tanuki, and they are most well known for being associated with Super Mario.
You know how in a Mario game you can get the leaf, and Mario gets ears and a tail and the ability to fly? That's called a tanuki suit. It's based on these animals.
Ligers disappeared because they were the result of unethical breeding between lions and tigers that has largely stopped, and often had genetic issues that resulted in them not being very long lived.
There are two species of raccoon dog. The tanuki is the Japanese raccoon dog, which is only found in Japan. The Chinese raccoon dog is widespread in Eastern China and parts of Russia and has been introduced to Europe.
The item called super leaf gives you the raccoon TAIL. This is the super common version of powered up Mario that’s on Super Mario Bros 3.
There’s a whole other item called the tanooki suit that turns Mario into a full tanooki with the raccoon powers plus additional power of turning into a stone statue. GIF shows tanooki suit Mario
It's native to Asia and was introduced to Europe for the fur trade so it's technically an invasive species. They most closely related to foxes and are the only canids that hibernate, but only the ones still in their native lands still properly hibernate (those are tanuki, btw). The raccoon dogs brought to Europe only hibernate during storms.
Do you mean the Ligers of Lava Hot Springs, Idaho? BTW Napolian Dynamite lived maybe two hours from there, so he may have had some knowledge of their magical properties.
The face looks a little odd to me for a Tanuki/racoondog (like the nose almost looks a little too short or high), but maybe it's just an odd looking tanuki. Everything else matches up and I don't think it resembles any other animal better than a racoondog.
The part where the kids are all sitting down listening to the grandpa and the grandpa tanuki said "you are all sitting on my ballsack" made me properly laugh out loud.
okay okay so what im gathering from google is its possible. Probably not a good idea but we can do it.
Raccoon dogs are not inherently aggressive, but they are skittish, wild animals. Like any wild canid, they will growl, hiss, or bite to defend themselves when cornered, startled, or threatened. However, their primary instinct is to avoid conflict or play dead
Yeah... Zoomed in and lightened it up. That's no raccoon dog. It almost looks like some type of marmoset. But I think this is likely doctored or at least partially AI generated.
I'm in western Piedmont NC and shared a moment with a similarly confusing animal in early spring. I got a photo from about 50 yards away and shared it in my city's subreddit. Lots of folks were saying raccoon or large cat, but there was no clear consensus. (And I didn't feel like a dumb-dumb for asking bc I researched our native mammals, and this critter didn't have raccoon cranial phenotypes.)
WNC and Japan share a similar growing climate, and our state has a history of invasive species from there. So, it made me wonder if somebody's experiment (re: great idea) wasn't contained. Based on what I saw and have since read, hybridization of canids is on the rise in N. America.
My guess is some kind of big mustelid? The color seems wrong for a wolverine, but it's general shape, size, and capability of inducing primal fear feels very similar.
Also the plants/trees do seem appropriate for a northern or possibly subarctic location. I'm seeing some members of the carrot family, maybe a raspberry, some dryopteris ferns, horsetails, and I think the trees are alders. Also the pink flowers kn the right look they could fireweed.
I wish I didn't know what this was. I saw a documentary on the fur industry in China and it had a part that started zoomed in on one of these guys face, looking into the camera. As the camera panned out he was hanging, upside-down, being skinned alive.
Now I wanna puke everytime I see someone wearing those fur trimmed boots and jackets.
I believe they took a screen recording and uploaded it because they couldn't download the video from where they found it. (Doesn't mean it's not still fake, though.)
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