Pedro Raccoon is the latest viral sensation of dancing animals on TikTok as more and more users hop into the trend of a dancing raccoon.
Pedro Raccoon: The Origins
The whole trend originally started on September 2023 after TikTok user @fleksa30 posted a short video of their pet raccoon, Ginger, dancing while the camera rotates.
The cute little video of the Ginger initially gained relative success in Russian-speaking communities, garnering over 10 million views and 2 million likes in the past seven months, but did not go viral on the international scene.
It was only after TikTok user @team7funny added the song PEDRO by Raffaella Carrà (Jaxomy and Agatino Romero remix) on March 31, that the meme has fully taken off to what it is today.
User @team7funny's video immediately became a hit, as do many animal videos on TikTok, gaining 18.8 million views and 1.4 million likes in just a little over a month.
Pedro Raccoon: The Meme
With more people getting exposed to the meme that is Pedro Raccoon, so do more users have started jumping on the trend.
The video was initially reposted multiple times across different accounts but later incarnations have started using other clips of Ginger posted from @fleksa30's account, many of which instantly gained millions of views.
It was only more recently that other animals were featured dancing on the same remix of Carrà's song, like with user @mintysquid posting a video of their cat similar to the original spinning raccoon.
In just two weeks, the video has already gained more than 13.5 million views and 843,100 likes. Similar videos from @jnostimt and @elcanol21 gathered far more views and likes in a much shorter time.
Similar trends can also be seen on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels where most videos on TikTok get reposted.
Pedro Raccoon Appearing Everywhere
As with all memes on the internet, the Pedro Raccoon trend has evolved past just dancing animals in a rotating circular camera.
Like with the Josh Hutcherson trend of last year, Ginger's dancing video has jumped from phone screens to anywhere with a circular whole.
One user, @kevorellana95, even had their smartwatch display the dancing raccoon as a live wallpaper. The TikTok video gained 13.7 million views and 1.2 million since it was posted on April 12.
