Transient charged for making raccoon a pet

A Panama City man was arrested after he was reported to be walking down the street with a raccoon on a leash.

Kenneth A. Tabor, 48, was charged with disorderly intoxication and felony animal cruelty for allegedly trapping the animal and leaving it tied up without food or water behind a downtown liquor store. He was booked into the Bay County Jail, and his young raccoon was turned over to state wildlife officers.

Kat Keller said she was on her way to a friend’s home when she saw Tabor on Sixth Street late Sunday afternoon. At first, she thought he had a kitten, but, as she drew nearer, she started to make out the hunched back and striped fur.
Sure enough, it was a raccoon. But Tabor wasn’t walking the critter so much as dragging it, she said.

In fact, “it didn’t really look like it could even walk,” she said.

Going past him, she and her 11-year-old daughter, Shiloh, watched as the man lifted the raccoon by the rope and held it in front of it his face, yelling at it. When he put it down, the animal still wouldn’t walk, so he grabbed it by the tail and let it dangle from his hand, she said.

“My daughter insisted I do something,” Keller said.

She made a quick stop, then turned and caught up to him near a diner on Sixth, where she got out of the car to ask about the little raccoon.

“He said, ‘Mine. It’s mine. I trapped, I caught it, it’s mine,’” Keller said.

She said the man looked as if he had been drinking, and he seemed angry. When she asked if she could take the raccoon to a wildlife preserve for him, the man got loud, Keller said.

She went home and called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. A dispatcher promised to send someone out. Just for good measure, she also called 9-1-1, Keller said.

She went to meet the Panama City police officers, afraid they were going to yell at her for calling about a raccoon.

Keller drove around asking people on the street whether they had seen the man. By the time she looped back, the officers had him.

Patrol supervisor Sgt. Robert Luther said Tabor, who seemed intoxicated, admitted to officers that he was trying to make a pet of the raccoon and had taken it inside the Rescue Mission with him, but claimed he no longer had it.

“He stated he turned it loose,” Luther said.

The officers kept looking, just in case. After another call, they returned to question Tabor again. He was even more intoxicated, Luther said, so they arrested him on the disorderly charge.

But Buchanan and McEuen still were curious about the raccoon, so they continued walking around the area. They finally found the little raccoon behind Ace Package Store, at the corner of Sixth Street and Massalina Avenue. It was tied to a palm tree and hunkered down in the weeds.

He was a little cranky, police said. They turned him over to an FWC officer to be checked out and released to the wild, Luther said.

“We’re all parts of a puzzle,” Keller said. “Everybody did what they were supposed to do, and everything had a happy ending.”