A meeting of local authorities was told on Friday that until recently the problem was limited to a few hundred and that around 300-400 raccoons had been shot in Poland’s Lubuskie region on the border with Germany.

But that number has now grown to 4,500 in the region and raccoons are beginning to spread into urban areas where shooting is not allowed.

Biologist Professor Leszek Jerzak said: “Despite its nice appearance, it is an omnivorous mammal and causes huge losses in agriculture and the environment.

“It eats corn, strawberries, grapevines, also birds from nests and nesting boxes.

“The worst thing is that it has no natural enemies. Even wolves or lynxes cannot cope with it.

“The raccoon climbs trees very well. There is no way to stop its development naturally.”

President of the Bory Lubuskie Hunting Association, Mariusz Jezierski, added there was a similar problem in the bordering region of West Pomerania, saying: “The raccoon is most numerous in the west, now it is moving to the center of Poland.

“We must prepare for the time when raccoons enter cities... because they carry a lot of parasites that are dangerous to humans and domestic or farm animals.”

Although not a native to Poland, raccoons have been present in the country since the early 1990s.

There are now around one million of them and experts fear they could begin to spread havoc in towns and cities as their numbers swell.

Dr Rafał Maciaszek from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences said: “It was man who created a threat to biodiversity by taking the raccoon out of its natural environment.

“It is necessary to take remedial action to minimize the threat. In the case of the raccoon, it is shooting or catching in live traps and then euthanizing by a veterinarian.

“These are specialized predators that cope very well in our conditions.

Lubuskie province governor Marek Cebula added: “The spread of the raccoon, which we were warned about a few years ago, has become a fact.

“It is not a beautiful animal. In reality, the raccoon is a huge pest, a dangerous animal, especially for children due to the diseases it carries.”