Raccoon Got Drunk on Peaches, Is Saved by Nurse

We may have to tweak the phrase "drunk as a skunk" to "drunk as a raccoon." In a story explaining that but leaving a lot to unpack, a Kentucky woman rescued a juvenile raccoon she discovered passed out in rainwater at the bottom of a dumpster—then administered CPR to save the little guy's life, reports the Lexington Herald-Leader. Misty Combs, who works as a nurse for the Letcher County Health Department, says she'd heard on Aug. 14 that there was a mother raccoon running around a local parking lot, and when she went to investigate, she says she saw that mama hanging out near a trash receptacle.

Combs notes that when she approached the dumpster, she found two young raccoons inside, one standing up, alert, the other unconscious and soaking in water at the bottom of the bin. The Mountain Eagle reports the out-of-it raccoon was actually intoxicated, after apparently consuming fermented peaches in the dumpster that had been discarded by Whitesburg's Kentucky Mist Moonshine Distillery. The facility soaks the peaches in distilled alcohol to make peach-tinged moonshine. "I would say that he ate the fermented peaches and he fell over drunk into the water," Combs tells the Herald-Leader.

She says that, with the help of a colleague, she was able to pull the raccoon out of the dumpster by its tail and onto the ground, where she proceeded to then give it CPR—don't worry, "compression-only CPR," not mouth to mouth, per Combs—until water started spurting out of its mouth. LEX 18 has video of Combs' lifesaving gesture, in which she can be heard pleading "Come on, baby, come on!" as she did her chest compressions on the critter. She admits to WYMT she feared at the time that the raccoon might have had rabies and was going to emerge from his drunken stupor and bite her.

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The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife soon came to transport the raccoon to a nearby vet, where it spent the night drying out and recuperating. Combs was able to help release the raccoon back into the wild the next day. The distillery, meanwhile, is getting some extra attention from the incident, plugging themed T-shirts depicting the raccoon—nicknamed "Otis Campbell," after the town drunk on The Andy Griffith Show—in a dumpster and swigging down some booze, with captions like "Gettin' trashed."