Animals Who Are Bad to the Bone: Criminal Critters Caught on Tape

Drunk monkeys, a shoplifting husky -- these animals are bad to the bone.

ByABC News
June 13, 2011, 3:22 PM

June 14, 2011— -- Lock your doors, grab your underwear, and for goodness sake hide your drinks. For some of the criminals in our midst are uniquely built for a life of larceny: They can eat through walls, or gulp a stolen gin fizz on the run.

Call it "America's Most Wanted" meets "Wild Kingdom." It's a menagerie of misdemeanors and furry felonies, all caught on tape.

Animals like you've never seen them before: shoplifting, burglarizing, breaking and entering -- even displaying public drunkenness.

VOTE for your favorite criminal critter!

From the tiny Caribbean island of St. Kitts: stealthy booze-bandits. Legend is the vervet monkeys here first developed a taste for alcohol hundreds of years ago while enjoying the fermented sugar cane. Now they cut straight to the rum chasers -- and steal their favorite cocktails. But they don't just steal, they drink -- way too much. And their coordinated, thieving moves soon belong to sloppy monkey drunks. It's disorderly conduct that exposes some real fuzzy navels.

"Have you seen their behavior after they have had loads to drink? They are having a party," Animal Planet animal behavior expert Victoria Stilwell said. "They look sneaky, and I think they realize what they are doing, they shouldn't be doing. But alcohol is too tempting. And once a monkey tastes it, and they have those woozy after-effects, of course they are going to go back for more -- because, like humans, they are going to get addicted."

At least the monkeys keep their table-crashing mayhem outside. Not so an unwanted stay-at-someone-else's-home raccoon whose idea of interior decorating is do-it-yourself demolition.

Willie was an adorable, squirming baby when Juan Carlos Grover rescued him just hours from death in the wild.

"He's about the size of a potato," Grover said in an early home video.

Willie was bottle-fed and lovingly raised in the house until he could get back on his feet, but he soon grew into too much raccoon for the house to handle.

"This is a $1,500 Gibson, and you can see deep claw marks in the back of it," Grover said, describing his gnawed-on guitar.

Grover tried to get Willie to move back into the woods, but young William had grown quite fond of domestic life. Not even locked doors could keep him out. No keys? No problem! Willie simply ate his way through the kitchen walls, even dangling out of one of the gaping holes to borrow a baking tray from the cabinet.

"A wall is nothing to a raccoon. Their mouths are so strong, they can chew through anything. Animals go to what gives them pleasure, what makes them feel safe -- and Willie is just doing that," Stilwell said.

Watch the full story on "Caught in the Act," a special 20/20, Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET.

No walls are strong enough, and even the second-story windows can't keep a determined Willie out.

"I finally accepted that Willie is always going to come back here. My advice to people who want to keep a raccoon as a pet is: Don't do it," Grover said.

So how about an easy pet like a dog? Well, be careful what you wish for. A stunning Siberian husky named Kiera looks like the perfect canine, but she tried to pull off the perfect crime.

It started when the family was late hanging her Christmas stocking with the usual bone inside. So Kiera went shopping -- with no wallet.

Surveillance footage from Smith's Food and Drug, six miles from her home, caught the unlikely shoplifter, and caught Animal Planet's eye for bad-to-the-bone behavior in its show "Bad Dog!"

Kiera walked into the unfamiliar store, and of the thousands of items, the thousands of scents, she picked out the exact bone annually left in her stocking.