June is smart and spoiled; Ringo likes the ladies.
The two have never met, but they have something in common: They’re both raccoons who go to work with their owners.
“It is Arkansas,” said Bethany Swindell, owner of Lavish boutique in Russellville.
June, 5 months old, belongs to Swindell.
Ringo, an 11-year-old raccoon, is the pet of Rhonda Garrett, owner of Country Time Flea Market in Greenbrier.
Both Ringo and June are popular — they even have their own Facebook pages. June has an Instagram page, too, with her “sister,” Paris, a dog, and June has been featured on a website called The Dodo. June was scheduled last week to have a live Facebook event.
Both women found the raccoons as babies.
“June actually fell out of an oak tree in my front yard,” Swindell said. It was summer — June.
Swindell and her husband, Russ, found the animal.
“Her mom was actually up in the tree looking down at us. [June] was so small. She didn’t have hair, and her eyes were closed. We left to go eat dinner. We figured her mom would get her. It was a big oak tree; she fell a long ways.”
Swindell said that when she and her husband got home, the baby raccoon was still on the ground.
“We warmed her up with a heating pad,” Swindell said. The next day, they took June outside, hoping her mother would rescue her; she didn’t.
“We never saw [the mother] again, so we had a raccoon,” Swindell said. “I was afraid she wasn’t going to make it. The vet said June was less than 2 weeks old. She was tiny. We had her two weeks before her eyes opened. We used to keep her in a little mail tub, the white ones that the post office uses.”
Swindell said her parents, Ed and Johnette Moody of Russellville, rehabilitated raccoons when Swindell was younger, “so I had some raccoons growing up. This is probably the sixth one I’ve had.”
She only kept one as a pet; the rest were rehabilitated for several months and released on her grandparents’ farm in Dardanelle.
“We see them from time to time,” she said.
Swindell said she fed June with a baby bottle.
“I knew what to do. They’re completely helpless; they can’t even go to the bathroom,” she said. “We had to do everything.”
They taught June to use a litter box, at the store and in the garage at her home.
“She’ll just be running, playing, and then she’ll just run past you, and you’re like, ‘Oh! She’s going to the bathroom,’”
Swindell said, laughing.
June has been a fixture at Lavish since the get-go.
“I started bringing her here at the beginning because I didn’t want to leave her alone, so she’s just grown up being in the store,” Swindell said. “She’s a shop coon.”
At Country Time Flea Market in Greenbrier, customers can meet Ringo.
“Our kids found him in our front yard,” Garrett said. It was July 2005, and she said he was about 6 weeks old.
Garrett said Ringo has “cerebral-palsy-like symptoms,” and he can’t walk or feed himself. The veterinarian said he may have contracted encephalitis from a mosquito. Garrett carries him in a baby sling or pushes him in a stroller around the store.
“He can move and stuff; he just can’t move good enough to walk and feed himself. We hand-feed him and hold the water dish or cup in front of him,” she said.
Ringo has been a regular participant with Garrett at the Chase Race and Paws in Conway each year, too.
“We go to nursing homes and rehabs and such as that, and schools,” she said.
Swindell said her customers are usually surprised when they first encounter June sashaying around the store. “They’re like, ‘Oh, you have a raccoon!’”
She said she asks customers if they are bothered by June, and she has a cage she can put her in. For the most part, customers are drawn to June, though.
“There’s a guy who walks his dog, and he brings his dog by to play with June every day,” Swindell said.
A lot of people want to touch June, too, and are surprised by her coarse hair.
“She’s not mean. She doesn’t like to be held by other people, but you can touch her,” Swindell said.
Angie Jones of Dardanelle, a friend and customer of Swindell’s, said she was shopping with her two daughters when they first saw June.
“My oldest, Kyleekay, was like, ‘Oh, mom, look at the raccoon,’ which shocked me, too. I know Bethany is an animal lover and just a real neat person,” Jones said.
She said Swindell will let the girls feed Doritos to June.
Jones said she jotted down a poem about June, which included that June’s owner “thinks she hung the moon — June the raccoon is a fashionista in bloom.”
Jones said June is “like a little celebrity now.”
Garrett, who has owned her business for about 6 1/2 years, said she has customers who stop a couple of times a year on their way to Branson, Missouri, just to check on Ringo.
“Kids love him, and the elderly,” Garrett said. “He likes women and boys — but not when they reach puberty. He’s pretty laid back, but when little boys start turning into little men, he doesn’t like them. He wants all the women to himself, so he doesn’t like them when he can smell hormones.”
Both women say they vaccinate their raccoons, but Garrett said she still puts her hand over Ringo’s mouth when people are close.
Swindell said now that the weather’s cooling off, June plays outside.
“I’ll say, ‘Let’s go,’ and she’ll go out the doggie door to the garage.”
Swindell has an older Pomeranian named Paris.
“They’ll sleep together and cuddle and stuff,” she said.
Garrett said she has four “big dogs,” and they get along well with Ringo.
“They just lick him in the face; they’re real protective over him,” she said.
She said Ringo prefers strawberries, watermelon or “something crunchy” to meat, but he has a delicate digestive system.
“We totally domesticated him because he eats dry food without … having it wet. He developed some indigestion a couple of years ago, so he has to have special dog food.”
Garrett said Ringo sleeps with her and her husband, and his favorite position is to bury his head in her neck.
They put Ringo outside in the morning to go to the bathroom, “and he’s usually good till the next morning. If needs to go in-between times, he chatters. If he chatters, he’s either hungry or thirsty, or wants to go to bed or the bathroom.
“We kind of figured him out as we went along,” she said.
Swindell said she’s not sure what will happen as June grows up.
“Right now, she’s real attached to me. When I got her, I was planning on rehabbing her and letting her go back out into the wild, but she loves air conditioning; she’s pretty spoiled,” Swindell said.
The women realize it’s a novelty for people to see a live raccoon.
“People usually just see them on the side of the road,” Swindell said.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.