Peanut, who has amassed more than half a million Instagram followers, was euthanized by officials to be tested for rabies.

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.

  • @[email protected]
    8•18 days ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      7•18 days ago

      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]