Meet Piper at Goat Daddy's Sanctuary in South Carolina

WISTV in South Carolina visited Goat Daddy's Farm and Animal Sanctuary in mid May of 2024 to meet Piper, a juvenile coatimundi.

(Screenshot from WISTV video.)


There's a great video of Piper being active with the news photographer and reporter in the enclosure while the co-owner talks about the coati's daily routine and care.

Piper is adorable in the video and very much exhibits the incredibly busy and enjoyably chaotic behavior of a juvenile coati.

What I REALLY like about this video is seeing that Piper's claws are all still fully intact (for those that aren't aware the majority of coati that come to an animal sanctuary or rescue facility were pets and typically have their claws (which is awful for the coati)/teeth removed. My stance is that if you have to maim an animal to have it as a pet? It shouldn't be a pet).
After watching the interactions with the newscaster, I'm pretty sure teeth have been removed. There's just no way that a tooth-intact coati would/should be allowed that kind of exploration of a stranger.

I love seeing videos like this that really demonstrate just how busy coatis are for much of their lives. These little goblins never rest when they're in go-mode.

Please check out the video here to watch Piper in action.

You can learn more about Goat Daddy's Farm and Animal Sanctuary here.

Coati Made Santa's Naughty List in 2023 at Zoo

I know it's late for something Christmas-related...but it's been a year since my last post.

But I feel like those who follow this blog and who love the coatimundi won't mind something that affirms what everyone who knows about coatis would at least smile at.

In December of 2023, the Drusillas Zoo in East Sussex compiled a naughty and nice list of some of the animals who call the zoo home.

Among them...and really to no one's surprise...a coati named Chop made the list...

And even less of a surprise?

Chop was on the Naughty List.

"Chop the coati: Chop snatches away all the tastiest treats for himself and doesn’t leave his little family a chance to get a look in on the goods."

I'd honestly be surprised if a coati ever made the Nice List...

Even the nicest ones always seem to be in goblin mode.

December 2024 will be here before you realize it.

Might be kinda fun to see if they do this again and if Chop can keep his crown for two consecutive years.

Tap/Click HERE to see the other animals that made both lists last year.




(Photo from the Drusillas Zoo)

Short Documentary: Guy Rescues Over 250 Cats from Trees...and One Coati

Came across this short documentary about a fantastic human, Patrick Brandt, who rescues cats from trees.

Patrick (at the time of the documentary) has returned over 250 cats that like to go places they shouldn't, until the consequences of their bad decisions strand them somewhere, safely to their stressed owners.

One day Patrick was called to get something not a cat...

If you're reading this blog?

You already know what that exception was...

A coati.




If you'd like to follow Patrick and watch the situations he has to get these cats out of?
Here are his socials:
Rescue My Cat Official Site
Rescue My Cat Facebook
Piedmont Tree Climbing
Cat in a Tree Rescue Directory (in case you need someone to call where YOU live)

After 10 years of searching....Charlie Crowfoot and the Coatimundi has been posted to YouTube!

Way back in January of 2012, almost ten years to the day (the orignial post was put up on January 25, 2012), I wrote a post about the film, Charlie Crowfoot and the Coatimunudi.
At that time Disney had been putting metal-cased DVD sets out that featured much of the company's old television shows and specials.
As they were being released, Disney had publicly posted the contents of each of the upcoming releases in the series.
And on one of those listings was where I saw something I didn't know existed...
A film by Disney that featured coatimundi...
Charlie Crowfoot and the Coatimundi.

I've spoken/emailed folks over the years who've had relatives that worked on the film and one whose father even handled the coatimundis!
Communication with a couple of folks gradually diminished and the only person I'd interacted with whose father had a copy of the film, eventually ceased and I was back at square one...
Until just a few days ago when I decided it'd been a couple years and that I should give the search another try.
I search the title on YouTube knowing I'd probably be let down...
And I wasn't.
In fact when the search results came back? My I covered my open-mouthed reaction with my hand and my eyes went wide...
There it was posted online for everyone to watch the antics of a coati in a Disney film (Encanto also features coatimundis with some pretty accurate gremlin-like behavior)...
I promise this won't be one of those recipe posts where I discuss mt g-ma's cabin by the lake for twelve paragraphs...

Here it is...after 10 years of on-and-off looking...
Disney's Charlie Crowfoot and the Coatimundi
Enjoy!

(I'll be writing a longer post about this film and the search for it later in a few weeks)

Old Photo of David Attenborough with a Coati!

I'm always looking for old photos featuring coati in them.
Recently a VR experience featuring the man was on display in London.
An article talking about Attenborough shared several photos...
One of which made me and, if you're as much of a fan of the coati as I am, will probably make you smile as well.
A photo of the actor with his son...
And a baby coatimundi.

See the full story here: Yahoo! Sports

Coati Moves Into Mansion; Evicted Soon After

A mansion is Tucson (that asked not to be named in the original article because they didn't want the publicity...but I'm here to tell you it was probably the Franklin House) became the chosen residence for a wayward coati in November.
Something had been ripping up the lawn (coati can smell grubs up to 2ft into the ground) and causing some havoc to the gardens surrounding the mansion.
After learning that the culprit, who was doing a not-so-great job as a horticulturist on the mansion's grounds, was a coati, the animal control folks set up trail cams to see whether or not the animal was alone or part of a group. Once it was determined that it was a solo male, traps were set.
Almost immediately the coati went for the bait, found itself in a trap and eventually being released back into the wild at Catalina State Park nearby.
You can find the entire article here at Tuscon.com

Cody the Coati of Murfreesboro, Tennessee's Animal City

Something that has always fascinated me are animal stories.
Animals have been players in some of the biggest moments of human history.
And sometimes?
They play a part in some of the smaller moments...
Like a lttle coati named Cody in Tennessee.
Around 2009, Cody wound up at a pet store in Murfreesboro, Tennessee called Animal City.
Cody was yet another victim of the illegal animal trade. Animal City received him after coming from the Mississippi from an exotic animal breeder (whether legal or illegal I do not know...but I'm absolutely against the breeding of coatimundi for this purpose).
For 11 years Cody was something of a local celebrity with people coming to the pet store specifically to see the little coati.
Described as a lightning-fast pickpocket, Cody's life at Animal City came to a quiet end during a dental surgery he was undergoing.
I have not reached out to understand why Cody passed during his surgery but as someone with several years of animal experience, anesthesia can become risky with older exotics.
I think it's fantastic that a local paper picked up on the story of Cody and posted it for others to read.
His small part in the story of a big world is important to document.
To let anyone who might read this or the original article about Cody know he was here.
After all, as an animal trainer I respect once told me... "They're just little people in different costumes."


Read more about little Cody and just a small sampling of his 11 years worth of antics at Animal City here.

Peel Street Monster Updated!

One of the earliest posts on this blog was an entry about the "Peel Street Monster" that I'd read about in the magazine, Fortean Times.
At the time that it had been published, the internet was still in its infancy-ish stage. Information continues from humankind's collective history; things like old newspapers, newsletters and various periodicals are making their way online more and more quickly adding more information to stories we're already aware of.
One such story is that of the "Peel Street Monster" that I wrote about in one of the first posts on this blog back in 2009.
Since that time, the "Peel Street Monster" has also become known as the "Wolverhampton Monster". More information about the incidents surrounding the story have shown up in additional sources and a clearer picture of what actually took place from the moment the "monster" first attacked to its death at the hands of a teenager with a brick to the misunderstanding that it was allegedly attacking a baby (it wasn't) to being dumped in a gutter to discovering it was a female to discovering there was another coati as well that was never caught (which makes me wonder if that coati had anything to do with reports not long later of a troupe of coati a few miles from this story's location).
Author Thomas Fair has written a fantastic short article about this little moment in history...
A moment when one of the most interesting animals in the world became a monster...
And, like a lot of alleged monsters and misunderstood characters throughout human history?
Repeated a lesson that continues to haunt us...
Our primitive fear of what we don't understand.
A fear that, more often than not, has time and time again brought about violence against the innocent.
Like an innocent litle coatimund a long time ago whose only crime was being curious and unusual.

Coatis Trapped in U-Haul Rescued

It's June in Cambridge, Massachusetts and someone is hearing noises coming from the inside of a U-Haul.
Upon closer examination?
They could hear birds sqwaking and chirping, but also something else.
Not long after making the call about the U-Haul, members of the environmental division of the local police as well as the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) arrived on the scene to force open the trailer.
What they found was typical of these types of heartbreaking animal rescue stories, particulary exotic animal rescues...
Locked inside the U-Haul were several birds, rats, chinchillas...
And four brown-nosed coatimundi.
All of the animal were housed in dirty cages.
The MSPCA put up all the other animals for hopeful adoption while the group tries to find an animal sanctuary or zoo that can take in the coatis.

I'll be calling the MSPCA to find out the situation with the coatis and update this story as soon as I can.

Link to the original story here.
Here's a video of one of the rescued coati.

Meet Fiddlesitx and his friends the Coati Gang - Kids' Film Features Coati as Main Character

I'm not sure how I missed this but...

An oddball kids movie that's like a mix between The Little Rascals and the old-school Pippi Longstocking features a coati as one of the lead characters!

Fiddlestix isn't just the name of the film...it's the name of the adorable little coatimundi featured in the movie. Fiddlestix is sort of the mascot of a group of misfit little kids who call themselves the Coati Gang.

How a coatimundi becomes the mascot amongst a group of German kids is something I started to ask myself but then I saw a trashcan launched through the air, an old man on a bunch of rockets lifting off and a car cut in half...that's when I quit asking questions.

But hey...it's a movie featuring a coati...and that's why we're all here, right?

Enjoy the trailer for Fiddlestix.

New Study Shows Female Coatis Teach Juveniles How to Steal!

A new study and research is showing that female coati will teach juveniles how to steal from unrelated coatis!

Ben Hirsch of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute:

"No previously published model of animal behavior would have predicted that young juvenile coatis should regularly attack and steal food from older relatives. Additionally, the pattern that adult females come to the aid of these non-related juveniles really flies in the face of what we thought. What we have described is a quasi-cooperative behavior that is evidently not kin based."

To read more of the interesting behavior follow the link below:

[LiveScience]

Who Wants a Cup of Coffee from South America? - Okay...who wants to clean coati poop off it?

"This is the most expensive crap in the world!"

Those are the words of Jose Jorge Durand the owner of Chanchamayo Highland Coffee.

For those that aren't aware there was a small ripple of a trend where animals (mostly civets...a small cat) would eat arabica bean cherries and later excrete the fermented coffee beans stripped of most of the usual bitterness of the bean.

It's one of the most expensive coffees in the world typically going for anywhere between $20-$65 a cup!

Know what's more eye-opening than a solid cup of coffee in the morning?

Yep.

One that came out the back end of a coati.

[REUTERS]

Animal Services in Memphis Discovers Coati in Home - Issues Owner a Warrant - Because Let's Do THAT first

A coati named Archie caused some buzz in Memphis recently when he was spotted in the window of his owner's home after a call went in to local Animal Services about his dogs. Animal Services (who in the video are seen taking photos of Archie through the window...and an officer laughingly flinches when Archie lunges at his hand through the window) states they've never seen whatever Archie is so they issue a warrant to the owner of the coati.

According to a friend of the owner of the coati, Animal Services said:

“They said, ‘if you can’t find him, we’ve already contacted the Memphis Zoo and if he can’t get here before the warrant gets here then they’ll kick in the door and take it’

That's always better than just waiting for the owner to respond...right?

The story continues to spiral into awkwardness when the owner shows up telling reporters that he bought the animal off of Craigslist for $375 because his girlfriend wanted something more interesting than a cat (because she's obviously more concerned with getting attention than just loving a cat from the shelter and wanted to help promote the sale of exotics through Craigslist...she sounds like a keeper) and that his name is Archelo Fettucini.

I can't fault the guy...he had vaccination paperwork (no permit is needed to keep a coati in Memphis...ugh) and calmly explained the situation.

Just another weird situation that circles around an animal that seems to find its way into everything...

Including the awkward home that Archie resides in down in Memphis...

Who's hedging bets that the relationship will eventually hit the skids and another exotic will probably end up in a bad situation?

Jungle Shuffle - An Animated Movie with Coatis

It was brought to my attention in the comments of an older post that an animated feature film starring coatis is a thing now. Jungle Shuffle isn't the greatest, but I always root for little animation studios that try their hand at a big project like a full length film. Available on Netflix, Jungle Shuffle is about a rambunctious young coati named Manu who keeps messing things up. When his girlfriend Sacha is captured by a human, its up to him to rescue her and the typical sidekicks and antics of a bunch of cartoon animals vs bad humans ensues. At first I thought, "That's awesome! A cartoon with coatis!" Then I was kinda glad that the film wasn't really that great. If the film was any good and became popular coati might've become the fashionable pet-of-the-week for a little while.

Photo of Researcher Being Attacked by Coati in 1927!

What you're looking at was something I discovered over on the Smithsonian's site.

It's a researcher in Panama in 1927 named Molino. I don't have any other information about the man in the photo.

The caption simply reads:

"Coati (Nasua nasua) attacking Molino due to noise of shaking keys"

Having worked closely with coatis, I learned that this sound drives them crazy! It can be clattering silverware on the floor or the jangling of a set of keys like in the photo above. Because there's nobody out wandering around dropping their silverware or jangling their set of keys in the wild, many who study the coati wonder why the sound triggers such an aggressive response from most that hear it or similar metallic noises. I've seen coati rolled cat toys around like they might a tarantula if they were in the wild...without ever learning the behavior or ever having had an interaction with a tarantula.

I would love to hear peoples' thoughts as to what it is about jangling keys or metallic sounds that causes the coati to go a little mad. It's a fascinating response and behavior that I've always been curious to learn about.

Would love to hear some theories.

1879 Department of the Interior Study on the Coati

During my routine search on Amazon for coati-related items, I came across an interesting study published by the Department of the Interior...in 1879!

You can read more about the author and zoologist Joseph Asaph Allen on a Wikipedia about him. Purchase the book on Amazon or get it on Google Play Books for free!

Pop-Sci Monthly Article On The "Coati-Mondi" - Written 141 Years Ago in 1872!

This is just awesome.

Popular Science Monthly featured an article titled "THE COATI-MONDI AND ITS COUSINS" that was written by Rev. S. LOCKWOOD, PhD and published in the December 1827 edition of the periodical. It even features a couple of sketches of the "coati-mondi" (one is posted above).

Being someone who's extremely interested in moments where the coati has turned up in history, this article absolutely fascinates me.

I'm not going to lie, it's an extremely wordy, adjective-filled article with the language of the day. Most people will just skim through it. For those familiar with the coati and its behaviors? Don't skim it. You'll miss some of the coolest stuff that will make you smile because you'll just nod your head that 141 years ago someone was dealing with an animal that's behavior has not a changed a bit.

Lockwood talks about the "Jack" getting into everything, describes the variations of the squeaky language that the coati "speaks", describes its love for eggs, talks about the perfuming of its tail, annoying other animals on the ship....and that's another thing...

This all takes place on a ship!

It's just a very cool moment in time when people were beginning to really document the world around them and exploration was in its modern infancy.

Take the time to read through it and really feel the time period and the environment in which it was written and you'll come away smiling that yet, once again, the coati nosed its way into another part of history.

Read the entire article here

Recent Study on Skulls - Coati Included

A recent study concerning the size of the frontal cortex in relation to proclivity to social activity in animals was carried out. About the coati:

"In her latest study, Sakai examined the digitally recreated brains of three species in the Procyonid family – the raccoon, the coatimundi and the kinkajou – and found the coatimundi had the largest frontal cortex. The frontal cortex is thought to regulate social interaction, and the coatimundi is by far the most social of the three animals, often living in bands of 20 or more."

The other three animals included in the study were hyenas, lions and raccoons. Read the rest of the very brief article

Wonders of the Animal Kingdom - Or how to eat everything in the animal kingdom according to a kids' sticker book.

I've been wanting to get back to this blog for a while. I have a lot of new things to post but would rather feed them out gradually over time than posting them all at once and then having another lull in posting to this blog.

Just a couple of days ago i was killing some time in an antique store in south-ish Florida and came across an old animal book titled "Wonder of the Animal Kingdom" (sorry...didn't look at all the who published/illustrated info).

The book was like a sticker book where you would collect dozens of different kinds of animal stickers and put them in the book in a space for the sticker next to the corresponding animal.

Of course I had to thumb through it to see if there was any mention of a coati.

There was.

Awesome.

Then I read the little blurb describing the coatimundi next to the sticker and my face went blank at the last sentence..."Its snout it large and its meat has an excellent flavor."

Wait...whaaat? "...its meat has an excellent flavor"?

Then I read the blurb above it about "119. The Hog" which stated in the last sentence about that particular animal that "All meat from this domestic animal should be thoroughly cooked before it is eaten."

After a couple more pages of similarly weird descriptions of animals I put the book back in its place under a bunch of other books that no one will probably ever buy and walked off.

Here are the cover of the book and the sticker and blurb about the coati.

Thanks for continuing to read the blog despite the massive gap in posts and I look forward to sharing more awesome things about my absolute favorite animal...the coatimundi.

Snookum Bears on a Rampage!

Originally titled "They Want That-A-Way" and distributed by Universal International, this 1948 Castle film (they're the people that did all the old-school news and informational short film 'reels' from way back before television), was described as 'a trio of bears romping around the great outdoors'. In 1951, the errors of it being a trio and of it containing coatis instead of bears was mentioned in the 'oops-we-goofed' section of their catalog. "The coati is so cute we re-christened him 'Snookum Bear'. The film never really got any traction when it was released theatrically in 1949. So here now is a look at an amazing little short film about four coatis who take up residence on cowboy's ranch and cause a tiny bit of a disturbance in the process. Found via the blog, The Coati Kids