Father charged in baby's raccoon attack

Some of y'all may have heard that a couple of weeks ago, a 9-month-old baby was mauled by two raccoons in her home here in Atlanta. Since the story broke, I've had a variety of emotions: sadness and horror, of course, and fear that people would jump to the wrong conclusions about raccoons based upon this one incident, and decide that all raccoons are rabid, vicious creatures. I also knew that there had to be more to the story than the news was reporting, because two healthy raccoons don't just go into someone's house and attack babies randomly.

Well, it came out yesterday that the father had been keeping the raccoons in the house as pets. Yep.

We're talking about it on a raccoon rehab e-mail group I'm part of. I've copied and pasted my response to the group below, in addition to my e-mail to the author of the AJC article.
( Click to read the e-mails. )