Dr. Logsdon said it was “surprising” to see an animal with this condition appearing to thrive in the wild. It “seems to be in reasonable body condition and he seems be moving very well and seems to have adapted quite well to what’s going on,” she said.

Jimothy has captured quite a few hearts around Seattle. Rebecca Sorensen, the owner of Ballard Clay, a pottery studio, commissioned a local artist to paint a mural of the raccoon outside her business.

“We thought behind the garbage can would be most appropriate,” Andrew Miller, the artist, said.

Sorensen, 45, said she first spotted Jimothy about six months ago. “We live at the dead end of an alley, and something caught in my headlights as I turned in and scurried away,” she said. The creature startled her so much that she asked her neighbors to check their home security camera footage. She told her neighbors, half-jokingly, that she had seen a chupacabra, a creature from folklore known for sucking the blood of livestock.

The small mural outside her studio has already begun drawing fans, Sorensen said.

Jessica Hinnenkamp, 38, stopped by Sorensen’s studio on Monday for a quick visit while in town from Virginia for work. “My husband and I are, like, the world’s biggest raccoon fans,” said Hinnenkamp, who is in the Navy. “We call each other our trash pandas. We have matching raccoon tattoos.”

Laura Exley, a Seattle-based tattoo artist, recently began offering a few Jimothy tattoo designs on her Instagram page. One customer had already taken her up on it, she said. “Every time that there’s a little internet thing that captures people’s hearts, there is an influx of tattoos of that thing,” Exley, 47, explained. She has over a dozen more appointments booked with people looking for raccoon ink.

In recent days, Dmitriy Ishimskiy, 36, posted videos he had filmed over a year ago of what appeared to be Jimothy as a baby, climbing on a fence in Ishimskiy’s backyard.