Shawi, the Trash Panda God
Shawi is the Choctaw name for the raccoon ( Procyon lotor ), a ring-tailed species of mammalian bandit. Raccoon in its family tree. I've known a bunch of them well. And I owe the trash pandas a blog post. The Trash Panda Family Tree (Mandatory Mammal Speciation Lecture) Without belaboring the biology more than it's worth (which for me is a lot), raccoons are classified by taxonomists in the family Procyonidae , which they share with coatis, ringtails, kinkajous, and eleven other species. Giant pandas, on the other hand, are in the same taxonomic family with as bears, black bears, brown bears, polar bears, big bears, little bears, and the bear that watched the still while Lord Buckley went into town to vote Raccoons were in fact long thought to be related to bears. (The German name for raccoon means "washing bear.") But truth is, raccoons are more closely related genetically to weasels, skunks, badgers, and otters than they are to bears. Collectively, they are a