Raccoon Emoji

🦝 is the raccoon, the masked, ring-tailed omnivore that became one of the internet's most beloved chaos animals. Emojipedia shows a gray raccoon head with a black bandit mask and pointed ears.

In texting, 🦝 almost never means the literal animal. It means 'trash panda,' a phrase Reddit user CarlPeligro coined in 2014 by commenting 'raccoons = trash panda' on a post in r/aww. The name stuck because it captured the exact joke: raccoons look like small, anarchic cousins of the giant panda, and they famously ransack garbage cans with masked-bandit energy.

The emoji carries three overlapping vibes. It's the chaos gremlin emoji, for when you're up at 3am eating leftovers over the sink. It's the scheming gremlin emoji, for anyone plotting something mildly unhinged. And it's the up past bedtime emoji, nocturnal, curious, and a little bit sus. Emojipedia notes the raccoon is frequently used in chaotic energy posts, late-night content, and anything involving food theft.

🦝 lives in a very specific social lane: unhinged-but-loveable.

Trash panda memes drive most usage. Raccoons thriving in cities, dragging pizza boxes across sidewalks, staring defiantly into doorbell cameras. The Instagram account Trash Panda Posts, Bored Panda compilations, and r/Raccoons all keep the aesthetic alive. Captions like 'my raccoon era 🦝' or 'feral behavior 🦝' usually mean someone's proudly owning some chaos.

Pedro the raccoon TikTok trend, March 2024 onward. A baby raccoon named Ginger, filmed with a spinning circle format to an EDM remix of Raffaella Carrà's 1980 song 'Pedro,' racked up over 14 million views on the original clip. The hashtag 'Pedro' has 569,000+ videos, and over two million videos use the sound. One dog named Josephine doing the dance hit 145 million views.

Rocket Raccoon fandom. Since Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Rocket has gone from an obscure comic character (fewer than 10 comic appearances in his first 30 years) to one of the MCU's most-loved characters. Marvel fans use 🦝 whenever Rocket is in a film, especially after Guardians Vol. 3 (2023) centered on his backstory.

Late-night shitposting. 🦝 is a staple of chaos-twitter and chaos-tumblr. The raccoon shows up with 🌙 for 'I am awake when I should not be' content.

Raccoons (Procyon lotor) are native to North America. The genus name comes from the Greek 'pro kyon' (before the dog), based on the old mistaken view that they were a kind of dog. In fact they're part of the family Procyonidae, closer to coatis and kinkajous than to dogs or bears.

The emoji was approved in Unicode 11.0 in 2018 as U+1F99DU+1F99D, after a 2017 proposal by Jennifer Daniel and Paul D. Hunt argued for the raccoon's 'multicultural symbolism' as both a trickster figure and a stand-in for the Japanese tanuki (raccoon dog). The proposal specifically flagged the need for better East Asian animal representation in the emoji set.

The raccoon's rise as an internet icon traces to a specific moment. On June 16, 2014, Reddit user CarlPeligro commented 'raccoons = trash pandas' on an r/aww post of a raccoon in a tuxedo. The nickname spread through Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter within a year and ended up on T-shirts, mugs, stickers, and eventually the naming of the Minor League Baseball team the Rocket City Trash Pandas (2017).

The same year, 2014, Guardians of the Galaxy gave the raccoon its cinematic moment. Rocket, voiced by Bradley Cooper and built entirely as CGI by Framestore, went from a cult-favorite comic character with 10 comic appearances to one of Marvel's most-loved figures. 2014 was the year raccoons became internet-legal.

1. 1934Raccoons introduced to Germany near Lake Edersee (Kassel area) under the Nazi forestry department, later escaping and becoming invasive↗
2. 1977Japanese anime 'Rascal the Raccoon' sparks a pet-raccoon craze, leading to an invasive population across Japan↗
3. 2014Reddit user CarlPeligro coins 'trash panda' on r/aww (June 16)
4. 2014Guardians of the Galaxy premieres; Rocket Raccoon becomes an MCU star
5. 2017Minor League Baseball announces the Rocket City Trash Pandas (Huntsville, AL)
6. 2017Unicode proposal for RACCOON FACE submitted by Jennifer Daniel and Paul D. Hunt↗
7. 2018🦝 approved as U+1F99D in Unicode 11.0↗
8. 2023Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 centers Rocket's backstory, triggering emoji spike
9. 2024Pedro the raccoon TikTok trend goes viral in March; 2M+ videos use the sound↗

🦝 looks like the same animal everywhere, but the cultural meaning swings wildly.

In the United States and Canada, raccoons are native, familiar, and mostly seen as urban pests or beloved yard characters. Trash panda culture is firmly American-internet in origin. North American raccoons are the source population for every raccoon invasion elsewhere.

In Germany (and most of continental Europe), raccoons are an invasive species. Estimates run 1-2 million in Germany alone, the highest in Europe. The population traces to a 1934 release near Kassel under Hermann Göring's forestry department, plus fur-farm escapees during WWII. The German word 'Waschbär' (washing bear) reflects the raccoon's habit of dousing food in water, though biologists note this is actually tactile exploration, not washing. The raccoon is now on the EU's Invasive Alien Species list.

In Japan, raccoons (araiguma, アライグマ, another 'washing bear' name) became an invasive species after the 1977 anime Rascal the Raccoon sparked a pet craze. Thousands of imported pet raccoons were released into the wild when owners realized raccoons don't make good pets. Meanwhile, the native Japanese tanuki (raccoon dog) is a completely different species, part of the dog family, and has its own rich folklore. English speakers often confuse the two.

In most of the world, the raccoon's name is a variant of 'washing bear': Waschbär (German), tvättbjörn (Swedish), wasbeer (Dutch), orsetto lavatore (Italian), pesukarhu (Finnish), 浣熊 huànxióng (Chinese), 아라이구마 (Korean / Japanese loan).

• •The phrase 'trash panda' was coined on Reddit by user CarlPeligro in a comment on r/aww on June 16, 2014.
• •Germany's raccoon population descends from animals released near Kassel in 1934 under the Nazi forestry department. Today there are between 1 and 2 million raccoons in Germany.
• •Raccoons have extremely sensitive paws. When they 'wash' food, they're actually using water to soften the hard layer on their paws, making them more tactile.
• •Minor League Baseball's Rocket City Trash Pandas broke merchandise sales records in their debut season (2020) thanks to the name.
• •The 1977 Japanese anime 'Rascal the Raccoon' sparked a pet raccoon craze in Japan. When owners realized raccoons make terrible pets, they released them. Japan now has invasive raccoons in all 47 prefectures.
• •The Unicode raccoon proposal (L2/17-278) explicitly cited 'trash panda' memes and the Japanese tanuki as reasons the emoji should exist.
• •Raccoons have a group name: a 'nursery' (family group) or a 'gaze' (general group).
• •Bradley Cooper's voice performance as Rocket Raccoon in Guardians Vol. 3 was widely considered one of the best of his career, even though it was entirely off-camera.

• •🦝 and 🐼 both use black-and-white eye markings. 'Trash panda' started as a joke about the visual resemblance, but the panda emoji is a giant panda, unrelated.
• •In Japanese contexts, 🦝 is sometimes used to mean tanuki (raccoon dog), but the two are biologically different species and folklore treats them differently.
• •In Germany, raccoons aren't a cute meme, they're an ecological crisis. Posting 🦝 at a German environmental scientist may not land the way you intended.

• •Rocket Raccoon (Guardians of the Galaxy, 2014–): Voiced by Bradley Cooper, built entirely as CGI by Framestore. A cybernetically enhanced raccoon with a heart as big as his temper. Guardians Vol. 3 (2023) gave him a backstory so brutal it broke the internet. The visual effects team studied real raccoon footage for four films.
• •Meeko (Pocahontas, 1995): Disney's mischievous raccoon sidekick, obsessed with food and small enough to fit in a sleeve. The gateway raccoon for a generation of 90s kids.
• •RJ (Over the Hedge, 2006): Bruce Willis voiced a scheming raccoon trying to pay back a bear he stole from. The movie is a meditation on suburban sprawl starring a trash panda.
• •Rascal the Raccoon (1977): A wholesome Japanese anime about a boy and his pet raccoon in 1910s Wisconsin. Sparked a huge raccoon pet craze in Japan. Today there are invasive raccoons in 47 of 47 prefectures, which is both funny and ecologically devastating.
• •Arthur (PBS, 1996–): Buster Baxter is a rabbit, not a raccoon, but fans often confuse them. Mr. Ratburn (also a rat) gets called a raccoon in memes. This whole show is furry-adjacent confusion.
• •Mean Girls (2004): Regina George's diet is 'one of those all-carb things,' which trash panda twitter has since reclaimed as deeply raccoon behavior.
• •Pedro the Raccoon (TikTok, 2024): Ginger the baby raccoon dancing to an EDM remix of Raffaella Carrà's 1980 song 'Pedro.' The original video, over 14M views. The trend, over 2M videos. An accidental pop-cultural phenomenon.
• •The Rocket City Trash Pandas: MiLB baseball team in Huntsville, Alabama. The name itself is a pop culture artifact, and the team broke merchandise sales records in its debut season.

• •🦝 is U+1F99DU+1F99D (RACCOON). Unicode 11.0 (2018). No skin tone modifier.
• •Shortcode: :raccoon::raccoon: on most platforms (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
• •If building a 'chaos energy' picker, group 🦝 with 🦊 🐺 🦈 😈 🔥 💀.
• •The 2017 proposal specifically intended this emoji to double as the Japanese tanuki. For Japanese-locale apps, surface 🦝 in tanuki/raccoon-dog searches too.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.