Lexi Quigley, 23, and Blake Olson, 26, rescued Oscar when he was just 2 weeks old from a friend's Florida backyard.
Oscar just might be the cutest little bandit you've ever seen.
The 4-month-old raccoon is definitely the life of the party at the Tampa, Florida, home he shares with two dogs, two cats and two humans.
Lexi Quigley, 23, and Blake Olson, 26, rescued Oscar when he was just 2 weeks old. He was found abandoned in their friend's backyard in nearby Bradenton.
"She has three big dogs in her backyard, and we think that her big dogs either went after the mom or scared her and she dropped him," Quigley told InsideEdition.com. "We put him back outside overnight in the hopes that the mom would come back and she didn't. If he would have been left out there alone any longer, he wouldn't have made it."
Little Oscar could fit in the palm of Quigley's hand when she found him and had only just opened his eyes and ears. She made a little incubator for Oscar out of a storage box and fed him kitten formula mixed with Pedialyte using a bottle.
"I grew up on a farm, so I had experience bottle-feeding infant orphan animals," she explained. "It was just something I knew I would be able to do."
At 11 weeks, Quigley weaned Oscar off the bottle and got him to start eating fruit. Watermelon and blueberries are still his favorites.
While it took one of their dogs a little time to get used to him, Oscar is now just one of the family.
But as cute as he is, Quigley wants other people to know raccoons aren't meant to be pets. She's worked with Oscar to get him to be less aggressive while eating and had to get used to him destroying toys by ripping their stuffing out.
"It is definitely a commitment and you have to be patient," she said. "They're made to be in the wild. They're supposed to be in the wild. So don't try and get one unless they're injured or abandoned. That's really the only time you should have one."
RELATED STORIES
