A raccoon peers out from his home in a hole in a tree in Moreland Hills, Ohio on Saturday, May. 15, 2010. Amy Sancetta/AP Raccoons may be a hassle in the US, but Americans generally don't get too worked up about them. They've been here for centuries, and we're used to them.

Not so in Europe.

It turns out Germany is overrun with raccoons. The rest of Europe, worried they'll be next, is now scrambling to solve their burgeoning raccoon problem.

The issue of raccoon overpopulation has a strange history, dating back to the 1920s. Germans in particular were importing raccoons from America to populate fur farms.

But the Germans also decided to release some of them because hunters were bored of local animals. Then a stray bomb during World War II hit a fur farm, allowing about two dozen more raccoons to make homes for themselves in the German forests.

That was plenty: Now, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, there are as many as a million of the furry critters pillaging across Germany. Their hunger for eggs is putting a dent in populations of native birds and even turtles. They make a mess of vineyards and attics, they cause car accidents, and they carry diseases.

To fight back, Germans are currently killing more than 60,000 raccoons a year (one important weapon is chocolate-baited traps).

More raccoons were brought to Europe from Asia in the 1950s, also originally for fur-farming. In the last several years, they've been spotted in the wild all over the continent, not just in Germany.

In 2012, researchers studying the raccoon population in Spain called for "urgent actions ... to control and eradicate this unwelcome invasive species." Madrid authorized raccoon culling in 2013, The Guardian reported. A raccoon spotted in Scotland this spring prompted a flurry of concern. ("Raccoons could cause millions of pounds worth of damage per year to the Scottish economy if they became established here," one Scottish official told the BBC.)

A raccoon at a zoo in Russia, beyond the reaches of the EU. Ilya Naymushin/Reuters To try to reduce the risk of raccoons and other invasive species gaining even more ground, this year the European Union is rolling out new rules.

They focus on non-native animals that live in similar habitats — basically, the species that have the highest risk of becoming invasive. That means grey squirrels, ruddy ducks, and — according to a recent report in The Telegraph — those pesky raccoons.

Countries are being asked to eliminate breeding and transport of the outlawed animals, and even to try to eliminate them when they're spotted in the wild.

Overall, the EU estimates that between the damage they cause and attempts to control them, invasive species cost more than $13 billion each year.