How the Alpine Inn Is Harming Raccoons
Imagine sitting down for dinner, watching a swarm of raccoons gather outside the window as they feast on restaurant scraps. Sounds like a fun, one-of-a-kind experience, right? That’s exactly what draws tourists and locals alike to The Alpine Inn in Omaha, Nebraska. Dubbed the “Home of the Wildlife,” this restaurant has been feeding raccoons for over 50 years.
But here’s the ugly truth: the Alpine Inn isn’t just feeding raccoons—it’s killing them.
While it may seem harmless to feed raccoons leftover fried chicken and cat food, the truth is that these foods are slowly killing them. Raccoons, like many animals, have specific dietary needs that aren’t met by processed human foods. The Alpine Inn’s practice of feeding raccoons fried chicken and cat food causes serious health issues, including:
- Obesity and Diabetes: Raccoons are highly prone to obesity, and the grease and fat from fried chicken only accelerate this problem. This leads to diabetes and severe kidney and urinary tract issues, which cause them painful, slow deaths.
- Taurine Poisoning from Cat Food: Unlike cats, raccoons produce their own taurine naturally. When they consume cat food, which has taurine added, it overwhelms their system and causes organ failure.
- Bone Splintering from Chicken Bones: Chicken bones are brittle and easily shatter when chewed, leading to sharp fragments slicing through a raccoon’s digestive tract, causing internal injuries that can be fatal.
What might seem like a fun dining tradition is, in reality, a cycle of slow poisoning, malnutrition, and painful deaths for the raccoons that visitors come to see.
Habituation is Homicide
Beyond the dangers of their diet, the feeding of raccoons at the Alpine Inn poses serious risks beyond just this one location. The act of habituating raccoons—teaching them to associate humans with food—can have devastating consequences.
- Increased Roadkill: Raccoons that have lost their natural fear of humans venture into urban areas more frequently, increasing their risk of being hit by cars.
- Higher Risk of Euthanasia: Habituated raccoons are more likely to come into direct contact with humans. Because many people don’t understand raccoon behavior, a raccoon out in daylight or approaching people is often assumed to be rabid—leading to them being captured and euthanized for rabies testing.
- Encouraging Harmful Human-Wildlife Interactions: Many people love raccoons, but not everyone does. Raccoons that have learned to seek food from humans wander into neighborhoods where they are seen as pests and often killed.
- Spreading Negative Tourist Behavior: When people see raccoons being fed at tourist attractions in the U.S., they assume it’s harmless. But these same behaviors are carried over to places like Cozumel, Mexico, where raccoons belong to an entirely different species—the critically endangered pygmy raccoon (Procyon pygmaeus). The behavioral spillover effect shows that tourists who casually feed raccoons in the U.S. are more likely to do the same abroad, where it can have disastrous consequences for a species already on the brink of extinction.
Alpine Inn Ethics
The Alpine Inn markets itself as a wildlife-friendly dining experience, but feeding wild animals in this manner is anything but ethical. By providing food that is actively harming the raccoons and removing their natural instincts, the restaurant is perpetuating a cycle of harm under the guise of entertainment.
Tourists and locals who truly care about wildlife should think twice before supporting businesses that exploit animals for entertainment. Ethical wildlife tourism should promote conservation and responsible interactions with animals, not encourage harmful feeding behaviors that ultimately put them in danger.
