Meet Tanu, the Japanese raccoon dog currently melting hearts on the Internet

#Aww!!!

Dylan Stableford
·Senior Writer

Can you hear that? It’s the sound of the Internet letting out a collective “aww” over Tanu the tanuki, a Japanese raccoon dog whose undeniable cuteness is melting the icy hearts of online users everywhere.

According to BuzzFeed, the buzz currently swirling around Tanu began when a Japanese man began posting pictures of his adopted pet on Twitter.

He told the website that he found the animal abandoned last June and has been raising him ever since.


A member of the Canidae family — which includes foxes, wolves and domestic dogs — tanuki, or Nyctereutes procyonoides (a scientific name that roughly translates as “night-wandering proto-dog”), weigh between 14 and 16 pounds and can reach over 2 feet in length. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, they’re native to East Asia but have since spread to Northern and Eastern Europe. And they make a noise similar to foxes’, which BuzzFeed describes as a cross between a “long whine and growl.”

As New York magazine notes, raccoon dogs are perhaps best known in the West for their inclusion in Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. video game. But they’ve long been a part of Japanese folklore, thought to have magical shape-shifting powers, and are now often depicted with “a bulbous belly, massive scrotum and a host of goofy facial expressions,” as they were in the 1994 animated film Pom Poko.

Tanuki are omnivores. In the wild, they eat insects, rodents, frogs, birds and fish — depending on where they live — and have even been known to forage for fruit and berries, using their curved claws to climb trees in the forest. Tanu, though, appears to eat whatever is put in front of him — that is, when he’s not next to the heater in the living room.


So you want your own Tanu? (And, really, who wouldn’t?) Not so fast.

Wildlife experts don’t recommend keeping tanuki as pets. In Europe and parts of Japan, they’re considered an invasive species, prone to mange.

But if you live in the Atlanta area, you can see two currently on display at the Atlanta Fulton County Zoo.

And don’t let that stop you from enjoying Tanu pics. Everyone else is.