The critter’s owner has said he was confident the test result would come back negative
Tests have shown that social media star Peanut the Squirrel, who was euthanized by authorities in New York State, did not have rabies, authorities in Chemung County have announced.
The animal, which had a following of over 900,000 on Instagram, and a raccoon named Fred, were seized from the home of their owner, Mark Longo, by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) in late October. The agency said it acted after receiving complaints that wild animals were being kept illegally and were potentially unsafe at Longo’s farm in Pine City.
Peanut and Fred were euthanized two days later, after the squirrel allegedly bit a DEC employee. According to the agency the animals had to be put down so they could be tested for rabies.
Chemung County Executive Chris Moss said during a press conference on Tuesday that the tests of both animals came back negative, meaning they did not have the infectious disease.
“Wild animals should not be in the home,” he insisted, justifying the authorities’ actions in the case.
“Raccoons, squirrels, they do not belong there. They are not domesticated animals. Our hands were tied when it came to whether or not these animals needed to be euthanized. Once the bite took place there was really no choice,” Moss insisted.
Longo responded that he was confident his animals were not sick.
“It is no real big shocker to me, considering I lived with Peanut for seven and a half years and Fred for five months. I am not foaming at the mouth. I knew the test results were going to be negative,” the owner said, as cited by CBS News.
Longo did not have papers authorising him to keep the wild animals at his home when at least six DEC officers came to take them away. However, he claimed that he was in the process of certifying Peanut as an educational animal.
The death of two creatures has caused outrage in the US and abroad, leading to more than a dozen DEC employees receiving bomb threats. However, police found all of them to be non-credible.
Just days before the US presidential election, Donald Trump’s campaign account on TikTok slammed the decision to euthanize Peanut, calling it a “needless” killing by the “Democrat bureaucrats.”
Elon Musk also said that the DEC’s intervention represented “overreach” by the authorities. The owner of X and the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX insisted that “the government should not be allowed to barge into your house and kill your pet! That’s messed up.”
