A wild night of debauchery in Ashland, Virginia, came to a sleepy end when an intoxicated raccoon was discovered passed out on the bathroom floor of a local liquor store.
A Spirited Break-In and a Scotch-Fueled Rampage
The masked intruder, identified as a common raccoon, broke into an ABC Store in Ashland. The animal's target was the bottom shelf, where it helped itself to the scotch and whisky. The ensuing chaos left a trail of destruction.
Smashed bottles littered the floor, a ceiling tile collapsed, and pools of alcohol were everywhere. It was, by all accounts, a scene of a wild party gone wrong.
From Rampage to Recovery
The adventure concluded on the morning of Saturday, November 29, 2025, when a store employee found the inebriated "trash panda" unconscious in the restroom. Animal Control Officer Samantha Martin was called to the scene.
"He fell through one of the ceiling tiles and went on a full-blown rampage, drinking everything," Martin told The Associated Press. She expressed a fondness for the animals, calling them "funny little critters."
The Hanover County Animal Protection and Shelter reported that the raccoon was taken to their facility to sleep it off. After a few hours of rest, the animal showed no signs of injury—aside from a probable hangover—and was released back into the wild.
The agency quipped in a statement, hopefully having learned that breaking and entering is not the answer.
Not the First Raccoon with a Taste for Trouble
This is not an isolated incident of raccoons finding themselves in boozy predicaments. In a separate event in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a nurse named Combs and her coworkers at the Letcher County Health Department noticed a distressed raccoon in their parking lot.
The commotion led them to a nearby dumpster, where the mother raccoon was desperately trying to rescue her two pups trapped inside. The location was next to a distillery, and Combs believed the babies had consumed fermented peaches from the dumpster.
Moved by the mother's frantic efforts, Combs helped rescue one of the baby raccoons, driven by what she described as a shared maternal instinct.
Officer Martin summed up the Virginia incident with a laugh, calling it just "another day in the life of an animal control officer."
