Coatimundi
A raccoon relative with a long ringed tail it carries upright and a nose that swivels. Females travel in bands and the adult males live alone.
Overview
A coati is a raccoon relative that lives in a band and forages nose down. It runs 80 to 130 centimetres with more than half of that being the tail, weighs 3 to 5 kilos in the white nosed species, and carries the tail straight up while it walks, which is how a band keeps track of itself in undergrowth.
The snout is the tool. It is long, pointed and flexible at the end, and the animal works with its muzzle pressed to the ground, sniffing out beetles, spiders, scorpions, ants, termites, grubs, centipedes and land crabs, with fruit on top of that. Unlike most of this shelf it is awake in the daytime, foraging on the ground by day and sleeping in trees at night.
Temperament
Sociable in one direction and solitary in the other. Bands of 4 to 20 are females and young, while adult males live alone, hold ranges that do not overlap and fight when they meet. That split is a fact about the species rather than a training outcome, and it shows up in captivity when a young male grows up.
They are busy, curious and hard on a room. A coati investigates by taking things apart, and it climbs anything it can get a claw into. Wild lifespans run to about 14 years, so this is a long commitment to an animal that stays that busy.
Care and grooming
Mostly insects and fruit, with some small vertebrates, which in practice means a varied diet rather than a bag of one thing. Obesity is easy to cause with too much fruit and too little movement.
Those claws stay sharp and are not for trimming down to nothing, since the animal uses them to climb and to dig. Expect scratches on furniture and on you, and expect a strong smell from an intact animal, which is one reason most keepers neuter.
Living and exercise
Height over floor space. A coati sleeps in trees, so an enclosure needs real climbing structure, platforms at different levels and a nest box up high rather than a hutch on the ground.
It also needs a lot of it. This is an animal that spends its day covering ground and turning over litter, and a bored coati redirects that into the enclosure itself, and then into whatever is beyond it. Ownership is regulated and the rules differ by state.
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