Life Lessons from
P’Nut the Squirrel
P’Nut the squirrel was executed by the state of New York.
He has since become a martyr of sorts. Credit: Wikimedia
Everybody has heard about P’Nut the squirrel. He’s been all over the internet. He even seems to have played a minor role in the recent presidential election. For the two of you who might have been living underneath a rock, here’s the Reader’s Digest condensed version.
In 2017, a guy named Mark Longo discovered a newborn eastern grey squirrel orphaned when its mother was struck by a car in New York City. Longo scooped up the baby squirrel and made a sincere effort to find a shelter that would take the animal. With no ready options at hand, Longo christened the adorable beast P’Nut and fed him with a bottle.
When the little guy was eight months old, his owner decided it was time to set him free. Longo released P’Nut in his backyard without fanfare. The following day, P’Nut was cowering back on his porch, missing half his tail. When Longo opened the door, P’Nut scampered inside. He has been an integral part of the Longo family ever since.
P’Nut lived with Longo for the next seven years. Together, they managed a very successful Instagram account that accumulated some 534,000 followers. Everybody loved P’Nut. Well, not quite everybody …
In April 2023, Longo and his wife moved to upstate New York and founded the P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary. By November 2024, they had rescued 300 orphaned or injured animals. That’s not the way I’d choose to invest my life, but I am genuinely happy for them.
In October 2024, someone lodged an anonymous complaint against the Longos and their animal sanctuary. Agents of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) descended upon the Longo’s home and seized both P’Nut the squirrel and a similarly-domesticated raccoon named Fred. Apparently, P’Nut bit one of them in the process. Both animals were subsequently euthanized so they could be tested for rabies.
P’Nut the squirrel and Fred the raccoon have spawned memes,
political ads and copious amounts of merch like this t-shirt.
Here's Where It Gets Weird …
There are a lot of moving parts to this story. Mark Longo has a vigorous OnlyFans account that was bringing him a cool $800,000 per month. His OnlyFans handle is “@squirrel_daddy.” P’Nut was apparently a big part of that, though I struggle to visualize exactly how. I don’t love you guys enough to go Googling @squirrel-daddy P’Nut porn.
Thanks to the miracle of the internet, people all over the planet are now energized over P’Nut’s gory demise. The saga has become emblematic of systematic government overreach. While that might seem esoterically comical, the sordid tale of a porn star’s murdered rodent does actually point to something deeper and more profound.
Deeper Things
New York City has seen an influx of more than 200,000 asylum-seeking migrants in the past two years. The homicide clearance rate in Gotham currently stands at 64%. This means that, in a bit more than a third of the cases, when somebody murders somebody in the Big Apple, they actually get away with it.
The New York DEC is responsible for issuing permits to clear debris-occluded waterways. They are supposedly maddeningly behind doing this. There simply seems to be no shortage of legitimate crises percolating out there to keep state law enforcement agencies gainfully employed. And yet, the NY DEC could still spare an entire team of agents to go steal a man’s pet porn squirrel.
Therein lies the problem. At some point in this whole ridiculous process, somebody should have just said, “Just stop. This is crazy.” And yet they didn’t.
This was the ad that drew in research subjects for Stanley
Milgram’s experiments on the psychology of genocide.
Peering into the Darkness
Back in August 1961, a Yale University psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted a set of experiments to determine just how far a normal person might go to obey an authority figure, even if those actions ran counter to common social norms. Using actors as faux researchers alongside fake research subjects, the actual subjects were directed to administer electric shocks in response to directives by a guy in a lab coat. The findings were objectively horrifying.
Though the actors writhing about in response to the supposed electricity was not real, a disturbing percentage of participants were willing to increase the voltage to lethal levels just because they were directed to do so. These experiments were successfully replicated at other centers around the globe. Milgram used his findings to publish a thesis on the psychology of genocide. You can honestly see some of that in the silly story of P’Nut the squirrel and Fred the raccoon.
Reality
Here’s the deal. I don’t want or need the government to tell me how to keep myself safe. I successfully raised a pair of orphaned baby squirrels when I was a kid. A dear friend of mine raised a raccoon. When several years later, she made the mistake of taking her pet into town; she was spotted by a game and fish officer who tore the beast from the screaming little girl’s arms and dragged it off to be killed. My grandparents did not have government agents policing their pet decisions, and they did just fine.
It is actually really challenging to successfully raise a wild animal in captivity. I have done it myself several times. Not a lot of folks will stick with it. Those that do for years on end clearly know what they’re doing.
Yes, it is theoretically possible that some idiot guy might try to rehabilitate a mature bobcat in his home. However, that is a self-regulating mechanism. He and the bobcat will sort that out easily enough between themselves.
It seems to me that the greater danger can be found in ceding all of this power to a government made up of people no intrinsically better than you or I. Just because somebody wears a uniform, sports a laminated ID card or carries a gun does not make them any more morally laudable than the rest of us. I think I can make my own pet safety decisions, thank you very much. If left to my own devices, I can actually make the vast majority of my decisions just fine on my own.
Ruminations
I hate that this unfortunate porn man lost his pet squirrel. I have no doubt that his distress was both real and utterly unnecessary. However, if the unsettling story of P’Nut the squirrel can tell us anything of value, it is that we desperately need to tap the brakes on our government.
You cannot do much of anything in today’s America without some piece of government paper saying it is okay. You can’t practice medicine or law, you can’t drive a car, you can’t teach school, you can’t build a house, and you can’t cut hair. You can’t be a plumber, an HVAC installer or an electrician. The government requires certification to hunt, fish or perform CPR. Legit, you can’t do anything. However, it has not always been thus.
The path we have followed to inject government deeper and deeper into our personal lives has been relentless and insidious over the past several decades. Today, they are coming for some porn star’s tree rat. Tomorrow, it will be something you actually care about. You think I’m kidding, but I’m really not.
