She hated water, attacked our Christmas tree, destroyed our wallpaper – but everyone who met her was won over
M
ishka was about eight weeks old when we got her. It was 2004, we were living in Dibden, New Forest, and I was looking to buy some guinea pigs. I saw an ad for a raccoon on the secondhand site Preloved. My husband, Graham, and I lived in Florida in the 90s and had a raccoon that would come into the yard. It had a bad leg, and we nurtured it, so I was very interested in raccoons.
I met someone who bred them after researching on Google, and we ended up with three, one after the other – we bought two, Nigel and Casey, and later, Mishka was given to us.
If you’re bringing up raccoons, they have kitten milk, which I got from the pet shop, to start with. They can’t have cow’s milk; they get really bad diarrhoea. I bottle-fed Mishka, then weaned her on porridge. She liked dog kibble, chicken sticks, berries, pumpkin and cheese. She wouldn’t eat any meat. She was eventually diagnosed with diabetes. My husband had to inject her every day with insulin. Eventually, she didn’t mind, but in the beginning she did bite him.
