How Jimothy the Raccoon scampered into the internet’s heart
On July 13th, 33-year-old marketing specialist Kiana Hall went out for a walk with her husband in the Ballard neighbourhood of Seattle and spotted an animal hidden beneath a car. At first, Hall believed it to be a cat until it scampered out from its hiding place and revealed itself to be Jimothy the Raccoon.
Hall was justified in her initial assumption because Jimothy, the latest animal to join the likes of Harambe, Pesto, Punch-Kun and Moo Deng in going viral, does not look like an average raccoon.
Speaking to Kimmy Yam on NBC’s Today, Hall said, “I was pretty surprised and confused, because the body shape didn’t look like anything I was familiar with. He turned around and I saw that masked pattern on the front of his face, and that’s when I realised he was a raccoon.”
Hall documented this in a video that she took of the iconic procyonic, where the animal scarpered into some nearby bushes while Hall remarked, “What am I looking at?!”
In posting the video to Instagram, the name Jimothy popped into Hall’s head. So when writing a caption for the clip, Hall gave him his name and the next chapter of the storied history of funny animals on the internet was born.
The clip was viewed millions of times and spread all over social media, all wondering what had given Jimothy his distinctive body shape. While it’s difficult to make diagnoses based on such a small clip, most have come to the conclusion that he has a rare genetic condition called ‘short spine syndrome’, one that is most prominent in dogs but can be found in all kinds of mammals.
Despite the clip being viewed all over the world, a more in-depth look at Jimothy’s condition came from someone in that same Ballard neighbourhood. Ben Trammell gave the world quite possibly the only thing that people wanted more than more clips of Jimothy the Raccoon now, which was, of course, Jimothy the Raccoon as a baby.
Trammell posted to his Instagram account that he’d lived in front of the cedar tree that Jimothy’s family lived in, and had seen that this was a condition that the famous trash-panda was born with.
“The family used our backyard as a protected on/off ramp for their nightly outings,” he shared, “He was so small and clumsy, but his mother and siblings were always so patient and caring, keeping him from falling and sometimes just carrying him.”
After those trees were cut down, Trammell lost touch with the family and didn’t have high hopes for Jimothy’s survival, so seeing the clip going viral and seeing the little lad in such high spirits was a wonderful surprise. Today, he’s one of the world’s most famous animals.
If you need proof, go ahead and Google “Jimothy The Raccoon” if you haven’t already, I promise it’s worth it.