Historically, one of the most reliable sources of widespread banditry was rulers ramping up military recruitment for major wars, then cutting their soldiers loose afterwards without pay, leaving a bunch of heavily armed men with military experience floating around broke and homeless.
Knowing this, whenever someone jokingly refers to raccoons as "trash bandits", I get a vivid mental image of, like, a raccoon succession crisis leading to a raccoon civil war, the aftermath of which forced the former soldiers of the losing side (who are all raccoons) to take up the life of the raccoon outlaw.
