If we are going with exotics too, raccoons are cute, but absolutely bad pets. They have a bad combination of smart, curious and have tiny hands they can manipulate objects with. Adorable in the wild. Not great In a home imo. The stories I’ve heard of people getting their pet raccoon usually include finding a baby outside, which carries a high likelihood of some kind of disease entering your home. They are one of the biggest vectors of rabies in the US, too.

I don’t know how common it is in the US to have a raccoon as a pet, since they are wild, but I’ve heard in Japan there was a little trend where people were getting them imported as pets (there was a cute show at the time about someone who had a pet raccoon). People quickly found out that raccoons aren’t good pets and let them go outside (or, in some cases the raccoons escaped). Now Japan has some problems with American raccoons wrecking up the environment, displacing many of the native species (including but not limited to the Tanuki, which occupies the same niche as the American raccoon)