LEAGUE CITY, Texas – It was a unique catch for Oralia Gil when she found a rare albino raccoon in her daughter's home in the Meadow Bend subdivision in League City.
Gil and her husband had been working in her daughter's yard Monday when her husband saw an animal around the house. They thought it was a possum, because they had seen them in the area before.
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Then on Tuesday, Gil's daughter, Nora Portillo, heard noise in her attic. She also noticed some of the vents had been broken.
"It knew it was a little critter," Portillo said.
She called her uncle for a trap, and her mother came over to set it up in the attic.
Gil checked on the trap Wednesday, and sure enough, it was the animal she and her husband saw the other day. Except it wasn't a possum. It was an albino raccoon.
"We were taking pictures. It was so beautiful. It looked like a white puppy," Gil said.
Gil said they called the Houston Zoo, but she said it couldn't take it because they didn't have the space to keep the raccoon. League City Animal Control ended up picking it up Thursday morning and held it until a licensed rehabber from the Texas Parks & Wildlife in Galveston took it in.
"I'm relieved that it's gone, but I'm really excited about it being so rare," Portillo said.
The Friends of Texas Wildlife housed an albino raccoon in January. According to its website, the odds of such an animal being born are about 750,000 to 1.