Does anyone own a racoon for a pet? If so, do they make a good pet? Are they hard to care for?

I would never own a raccoon.

I looked out the window and watched in the soft light of an overhead lantern while the humongous coon sat and ate all my cat's food. He looked right at me through the window, but he would not scare off.

Scarcely could I even scare him while banging on a large metal bucket with a hand trowel. The loud noise made him move away, but only moving slowly as a wild animal that has become accustomed to an urban lifestyle.

When I was a kid in the country, I put some little baby chicks into a rabbit cage in the barn. Should be safe, right? The holes in rabbit cages are deliberately small to keep snakes from getting in and eating baby bunnies.

When I got up in the morning and went out to feed them I smelled the stench of carrion. When I looked into the cage I found a single leg of one of the baby chickens. The coon had reached into the cage and had eaten it alive, bite by bite, as it pulled it through, leaving only the leg that wouldn't fit.

The reason I know it was a raccoon and not an opossum (they are horrible predators as well) is because I later caught it in a live trap. I released it miles away and hoped it wouldn't come back. Either it came back, or it had several relatives. I ended up getting a nice aggressive farm dog to chase them off.