About

Pumpkin the Raccoon is a wild female raccoon that was adopted as a pet by a family in the Bahamas. After becoming house-bred, photographs of Pumpkin both by herself and with the dogs in the household became popular online.

Origin

Pumpkin fell out of a tree in the backyard of Rosie Kemp of the Bahamas in October 2014 as a baby. The local animal shelter would not take the raccoon, so Kemp and her daughter, Laura Young, began caring for the raccoon themselves in their home.^[2] On December 30th, 2014, Young began posting on Instagram a photo diary of caring for Pumpkin, who immediately befriended her dogs, Toffee and Oreo. This first photo has received 6,498 likes as of January 12th, 2016.^[1]

Spread

Pumpkin's Instagram profile quickly began growing in popularity, partially because of the novelty of a pet raccoon, and partially because the raccoon was very cute. A reddit post to /r/aww titled "My friend rescued a baby raccoon. Meet Pumpkin, the raccoon who is too cute to handle!" on February 4th, 2015 received 3,006 points (95% upvoted) before it was archived.^[5] Other photos of Pumpkin began to become popular in the forum as well.^[6] In October 2015, CBS News online published an article about Pumpkin's story;^[2] by then, the raccoon already had over 77,000 followers. As of January 12th, 2016 Pumpkin has 514,000 followers on Instagram, over 50,000 likes on Facebook,^[3] and over 3,200 followers on Twitter.^[4]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References