Peanut, who has amassed more than half a million Instagram followers, was euthanized by officials to be tested for rabies.
Peanut, the Instagram-famous squirrel that was seized from its owner’s home Wednesday, has been euthanized by New York state officials.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation took Peanut, as well as a raccoon named Fred, on Wednesday after the agency learned the animals were “sharing a residence with humans, creating the potential for human exposure to rabies," it said in a joint statement with the Chemung County Department of Health.
Both Peanut and Fred were euthanized to test for rabies, the statement said. It was unclear when the animals were euthanized.
Okay, I was initially totally against the DEC but reading the article really changed my mind. You need a license to own wild animals in NY. Ya know cause they should not be pets… also wildlife rehabilitation requires a license and training. Also rehabilitating means returning them to the wild. Not to mention an extra license and training for animals that are common carriers of rabies.
He has a squirrel for 7 years as a pet without a license with zero intention to rehabilitate his animals. He was using them to make money. Getting them to do tricks, wear hats and clothes. He essentially had a roadside zoo, but his customers were online. He says he was in the process of getting a license. He had the squirrel for 7 years, and was actively collecting more animals. This guy sucks, no wonder people were reporting him.
Oh man I don’t enjoy being that guy right now but for the love of all, It’s CUSTOMERS. Costumers are people who work in dress-up.
I’ve only seen this in the past few years, but it’s become such a common mistake. I don’t understand it.
Sorry, I mean you’re making a salient point about the lack of a license and all. Even so, if he’s been caring for the squirrel domestically for seven years, where do they think the supposed rabies would have come from? It doesn’t just manifest.
All these mistakes grind my gears, but this one is especially bad. Some of them make sense because of the way the word is pronounced.
Who is out there saying costumers instead of customers? Nobody says it like that.
Autocorrect says it like that, and it’s an easy one to miss if you aren’t paying close attention.
Naw it’s all good thanks! I’m dyslexic so I swap the vowels, I’ve always done it. Lol
They recently obtained a raccoon. Which are one of the most common animals to get rabies. He also attempted to release the squirrel when it was 8 months old. It came back injured. It could have been infected then, rabies can lie dormant for years.
Well… It’s English. Y’all’s vowels are 90 % schwa and half of the rest is completely dependent on the accent.
“Cuh-stuh-muh”. Same vowel. If English’s spelling was to be redone, I vote for a hangul-style writing system but with the vowels only implied: kx/stx/mx.
A wildlife rehabilitator (Nessie) on TikTok pointed out that his squirrel and his raccoon would not have had access to veterinary care (ie, vaccination for rabies).
She also pointed out that showcasing wildlife in social media is currently unregulated - in person exhibitions requiring an expensive license to get. This is a bit of a loophole, and what that guy did is likely to get that loophole closed up, and impact sanctuaries that do operate within the current law while using social media platforms to fundraise.
Also, personally, the way he showcased the animals just seemed inappropriate - squirrels eating human food just seems problematic. Iirc he ran a domestic rescue, not a wildlife rescue, which is a different skill set. Wildlife rescuers avoid interacting with animals as much as possible. Animals aren’t toys and don’t have the same kinds of needs we do, and the fact they are cute shouldn’t complicate our emotions.
Social media is unregulated but owning them isn’t. He needed a license to keep them, which he didn’t have. And the “sanctuary” is just for domestics that was started last year. The website sells t shirts and options for donations. It seems like they got internet famous because of the squirrel and opened this as a way to make money.
Yeah - the more I look into it, the less sympathetic I am. There’s a lot of good reasons to have regulations for wildlife. A lot of “common sense” is just wrong (like the “mother birds abandon babies because of human scent”), and sometimes that gets animals killed unnecessarily. Folks assume because they know how to deal with a cat or a dog that squirrels and raccoons will be similar - they aren’t.
Legitimate wildlife rescues with ambassador animals don’t typically present them as pets. An animal being unreleasable is a fail state. A legitimate rescue will be trying to make the most out of a bad situation. When I’ve talked to keepers or watched vids online, they understand it as tragic that the animal will not be able to live its life independently - the fact that they can make money because people like getting to see cute animals is just trying to get something good out of it.
Squirrels aren’t domestic. They aren’t supposed to live with us.
[I’m not a wildlife expert, but I’ve shoveled shit as a volunteer at lots of different types of refuges and have chatted with many of the types of folks who run these places]
Yeah agreed.
These people suck, and got those animals killed unnecessarily.
I read the article and can’t believe someone could read the same thing and come away thinking, “this guys sucks.”
You can’t believe people would be angry that someone illegally kept an animal an forced it to perform for his own profit?
You must be really unfamiliar with the history of animals in circus performances.
Disgusting, FYI yes squirrels can carry rabies, but it is extremely, I say again EXTREMELY rare, and transmission to a human via a squirrel is even MORE rare than that. Typically rabies just outright kills small rodents such as squirrels
It isn’t that the virus outright kills them. They just typically don’t get close enough to animals that could infect them. They are prey animals so they wouldn’t approach infected animals, they would run. They are also very small so the initial bite or scratch that could infect them kills them before they actually develop the disease. But a squirrel living with a raccoon because some guy thought it was cute. Yea, that would do it
It is rare, but it may be worth pointing out a celebrity Squirrel will have much more frequent contact with humans than a wild Squirrel.
From reading the article, they would have been OK to keep the animals as long as they didn’t stay in the home.
Ridiculous and wholly unnecessary government overreach. Every official that touched this should be fired and publicly dragged through the mud.
OK, we have very serious, and honestly, pants-shittingly paranoid responses to rabies for a really good fucking reason:
If you show symptoms, you are dead. Period. And not a nice death.
When I was young, you saw a wild dog, lot of people would reach for their rifle, it was just their reflex.
Maybe we have to update the laws, but they are there for a reason, and one of those reasons is why we don’t have too many rabies deaths in this country, and we are still considered one of the countries with high risk of rabies.
Tl;Dr - don’t fuck with rabies.
They put the animals in isolation and re turn them when they are cleared. I know they can that’s what happened to my neighbor’s dog after it bit someone.
They do that for dogs, cats and ferrets.
Dogs, cats and ferrets
Following rabies exposure, unvaccinated dogs, cats, and ferrets should be euthanized since no licensed biologics can ensure that they do not develop rabies. If the owner declines, dogs and cats need a strict 4-month quarantine, and ferrets need strict 6-month quarantine. They also need immediate rabies vaccination. Demonstrating an adequate serological response to vaccination may result in health officials reducing the quarantine period. Quarantine should be conducted in a secure facility that ensures people and other animals do not become exposed.
Other mammals
Other mammals should be euthanized immediately.
https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/hcp/veterinarians/index.html
We do not know how long rabies incubates in all animals, and they do NOT FUCK AROUND WITH THIS!!!
I spoke to vets, their faces go to stone when rabies exposure seriously comes up, this is not a disease, it is a literal nightmare, the worst zombie scenario you can imagine made reality.
It tears apart your mind completely and there is no treatment at all. Your family gets to watch.
This is just nothing to fuck with.
Yes i know how bad rabbies is. I was pointing out you can put the animals in isolation and see if they show signs on rabbies
How long?
Ferrets can incubate for almost 6 months.
Possums can carry forever with a dormant infection.
Can the animal’s immune system defeat the infection entirely, or merely send it back to a carrier state? How do you characterize the behavior of the species in different stages of infection?
We don’t know, because experimenting on these fuckers is nightmarishly dangerous, and we would have to test literally each mammal.
The plan is to wipe out rabies forever so we never have to deal with it, which is what happened in Europe, and which we could do here except our livestock tend to graze alongside wild animals.
Considering that most mammals can carry rabbies ending the disease is impossible.
They basically ended it in Europe and Australia.
Also, incidence has plummeted incredibly over the past century, though we had an uptick a decade ago.
We could effectively eliminate it, but the greatest generation cared about that, they feared it rightfully, we don’t anymore.
The reason it’s coming back is just complacency.
Those officials think rabies is like a magical disease. It suddenly manifests are seven years. What a bunch of trash humans.
The statement said one of the officials involved in the investigation into Peanut and Fred was bitten by the squirrel.
Sorry but they had no real choice on this one. Vaccines can and should be administered immediately to any human bitten by an animal in all cases, but vaccines are not foolproof and the animals must be tested. The only method to test for rabies is removal of brain tissue.
Just because a wild animal is docile to some humans or has its own social media account does not mean they are pets and they should never have been in this situation unless the property owner was a certified rescue and rehab.
The dude had started getting his certification seeing as the squirrel didn’t want to return to nature and had become domesticated when the raid happened. The owner wanted to be in line with the law, but that apparently just put a giant flag on him. Also, do they have to conduct a surprise raid instead of just approaching the guy and attempting to be civil with him? I saw no information that a civil approach was taken.
The NBCNews article doesn’t mention the word raid anywhere, it says inspection. If you know more about the story then your words are plausible but going by the article your account doesn’t match. The owner waited 7 years to try for certification, supposedly.
Linking to that psyop in any context proves your worth: zero.
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but vaccines are not foolproof
Yes they are. Only pointing out so there is not unnecessary fear spread about rabies. It is 100% preventable before or after exposure.
Does the rabies vaccine work? The rabies vaccine works remarkably well. Studies indicate that if the vaccine is given immediately and appropriately to someone who was bitten by a rabid animal, it is 100 percent effective.
https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-details/rabies-vaccine
You can put the animals in isolation
But you cannot test for rabies without killing the animal. Rabies infections spread up the nervous system to the brain in hours, not weeks.
The animal bit a human, at that point nothing could be done.
You can vaccinate the bitten human right away without any test, which is how it’s really done. Waiting for test results is not a good idea. If the vaccine didn’t work (it does work if administered in time), then there would be no help for the person. Testing is unnecessary.
You always get vaccinated for an animal bite immediately no matter what. There are additional doses and close observation for confirmed cases.
Foolproof**
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Harambe 2.0
We just jumped timelines again.
After reading the whole thing, this is heartbreaking
Oops! They didn’t have rabies! Here you go! They’re in the bag.
Bureaucracy saves the day! /s
“I was just going through our daily routine of feeding all of our 71 rescued horses”
Okay now he’s just flexing
It would be a shame if 4chan somehow found out who reported the guy. And decided to serve justice “their own way” =)
(i know i’m risking my account but it’s worth it just this once)
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