Growing up in the city, across the street from a small park squirrels and chipmunks were all over the place.  They usually kept their distance and we co-existed peacefully.

Every once in awhile we’d hear the sickening sound of a crunch and see a flat squirrel that was run over.

30 years later, there is a squirrel around our house that will get within 3 feet of me when I’m on the front porch.  I think he eats from the small dish of dry cat food I have out there for our cat.

The last few years I’ve noticed several “wild” animals that have learned to become more gutsy, or aggressive who hang out at a coffee shop we sometimes visit in Michigan, or at a restaurant here in Fort Wayne.  There’s the family of raccoons that would reach their hands/paws up thru the boards of the deck we were sitting on waiting for bread and the duck the would actually poke you with his beak  when he came to your table begging for a morsel.

What prompted me to write this was this Facebook posting I saw a few days ago: