patrick.net

http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/nazi-raccoons-on-the-rampage-as-european-population-explodes

"Raccoons, indigenous to North America, were first brought to Germany in the 1920s and bred in captivity for their fur. Everything went well for a few years but then, in the 1930s, a few of them escaped from a farm near Berlin.

Rumour has it that around the same time, Hermann Goering, the founder of the Gestapo and head of Adolf Hitler's air force as well as being Nazi Germany's most senior forestry official, ordered two pairs to be released into the wild near the Edersee Dam in western Germany so that they could be hunted."

"Germany's current population of 500,000 raccoons derive from that handful of escaped and released raccoons.

Experts say their numbers have been exploding in recent years and will soon reach about one million.

The animals are conquering territory in Scandinavia and some have even managed to cross the Alps into southern Europe.

"They are spreading rapidly. The population was stagnant for a long time but something has happened in the last 10 years to cause them to thrive," Torsten Reinwald, a biologist at the German Hunting Federation, said

"They've adapted to their environment. They eat anything and they aren't especially particular about where they live."

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