Mishka was about eight weeks old when we got her. It was 2004, we were living in Dibden, New Forest, and I was looking to buy some guinea pigs. I saw an ad for a raccoon on the secondhand site Preloved. My husband, Graham, and I lived in Florida in the 90s and had a raccoon that would come into the yard. It had a bad leg, and we nurtured it, so I was very interested in raccoons.<\/p>\n
I met someone who bred them after researching on Google, and we ended up with three, one after the other \u2013 we bought two, Nigel and Casey, and later, Mishka was given to us.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re bringing up raccoons, they have kitten milk, which I got from the pet shop, to start with. They can\u2019t have cow\u2019s milk; they get really bad diarrhoea. I bottle-fed Mishka, then weaned her on porridge. She liked dog kibble, chicken sticks, berries, pumpkin and cheese. She wouldn\u2019t eat any meat. She was eventually diagnosed with diabetes. My husband had to inject her every day with insulin. Eventually, she didn\u2019t mind, but in the beginning she did bite him.<\/p>\n
If you crossed Mishka, she would let you know. She lived in an enclosure in the utility room, and then used to come out into the lounge and have the run of the house. We used to put our dogs, chorkies Kennedy and Elf, in the bedroom when she left the utility room. If she was in a bad mood, she\u2019d bite you and growl, but mainly she was loving. I could hug her, kiss her, brush her. She hated water. She wouldn\u2019t get in the bath unless it was dry. We had to use wipes to clean her. But she didn\u2019t smell.<\/p>\n
\u2018She stripped the wallpaper off my walls with my dog\u2019 \u2026 Mishka. Photograph: Gill Waters<\/p>\n
Mishka didn\u2019t like the other two raccoons, so she used to terrorise them a bit by hitting them on the head. When we first got her, she had a large cage in the lounge, where she could relax on a hammock. One day, she climbed on top of the cage and jumped into a Christmas tree. That was hysterical. Together with my dog, she stripped the wallpaper off my walls. She was a naughty, mischievous, gorgeous raccoon.<\/p>\n
It used to be legal in the UK to keep raccoons as pets, but then an invasive species law came in that meant you weren\u2019t allowed to buy, sell or give them away. We were allowed to keep ours until they died. Mishka wasn\u2019t well the last couple of weeks of her life, which was horrible. The vet didn\u2019t know what was wrong with her but I think she had a brain tumour. She died last May, aged seven.<\/p>\n
She was my pride and joy. We just had so much fun. Everyone thought we were crazy \u2013 our family, our friends \u2013 but anyone who met Mishka fell in love with her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mishka was about eight weeks old when we got her. It was 2004, we were living in Dibden,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":{"0":"post-275452","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}