Framing the Raccoon: Discourse, Governance, and Ethics in Urban Wildlife Management in Germany

Raccoons (Procyon lotor) are classified as an invasive alien species of European Union concern, yet their governance involves ecological, legal, and ethical considerations. This study examines how raccoons are framed and governed in Germany, with particular attention to Berlin and Kassel/Hesse, and how these framings legitimise different interventions. Frame analysis and critical discourse analysis were applied to 39 governmental, parliamentary, public-information, and organisational documents. Four recurring and overlapping frames were identified: invasive threat, urban conflict/pest, manageable population, and cohabiting neighbour. These frames define harm and allocate responsibility differently, legitimising responses ranging from prevention and coexistence to hunting and fertility control. They also differ in which forms of animal suffering they make visible or obscure. Even non-lethal fertility control could reproduce a control-oriented logic when the need to reduce raccoon populations was assumed rather than justified. Raccoon governance is therefore shaped not only by ecological evidence and legal obligations but also by judgments concerning risk, order, belonging, care, and control. The analysis shows how invasive classification structures evidential and moral priorities, foregrounding population-level ecological harms while often subordinating human responsibility and the interests of individual raccoons. It argues that invasive status alone cannot establish either the necessity or the ethical acceptability of intervention: documented local harms, expected benefits, harms imposed on individual animals, feasible alternatives, and human responsibility must all be made explicit, while non-intervention must remain possible where serious harm has not been demonstrated.