Kevin Rose's Raccoon Toss

Overview

Kevin Rose’s Raccoon Toss refers to security camera footage of Digg founder Kevin Rose throwing a wild raccoon down a flight of stairs after he discovered the animal attacking his pet dog Toaster.

Background

On July 20th, 2013, Rose uploaded a video titled “My dog Toaster was attacked by a raccoon” to YouTube, which featured two different camera angles of Rose pulling a raccoon off of his dog and throwing it down a flight of stairs outside of his apartment (shown below). Within the first 72 hours, the video gained over 5.4 million views and 34,000 comments.

Notable Developments

On the same day, Redditor Diuhbeetus submitted the video to the /r/videos^[1] subreddit, where it received more than 28,300 up votes and 3,900 comments in the next 48 hours. Immediately after, Redditor kukamunga submitted a looped GIF of the raccoon toss to the /r/gifs^[2] subreddit (shown below), accumulating upwards of 22,200 up votes and 1,100 comments within the same time frame.

Also on July 20th, Tech Crunch^[3] published an article about the video, which compared it to an animated GIF of apes throwing a raccoon at a zoo. On July 21st, Redditor HumpmeBear suibmitted a screenshot of Kevin Rose’s Wikipedia page to the /r/funny^[11] subreddit, which had been edited to include the description “Feared by racoons [sic] across the United States” (shown below, left). On July 22nd, Rose posted a photo on Instagram^[10] of Toaster with the caption “resting up after the raccoon attacked him” (shown below, right).

In the coming days, articles about the raccoon attack were published on several news sites, including Gawker,^[5] Time,^[6] Business Insider,^[7] The Huffington Post,^[8] The Daily Mail^[4] and CNET.^[9]

Search Interest

External References