Learning the Lessons of New York’s Great P’Nut Raid — and the Backlash

In our wildly bunkered and polarized media environment, you are either intimately familiar with the sad demise of a media star named P’Nut the squirrel or may think I’ve suffered a rapid-onset neurological decline and am typing out random words. But there are important PR lessons in the subsequent social-media backlash triggered by the tale that bear consideration should former President Donald Trump prevail on Tuesday and implement his deportation plans.

P’Nut and Fred. All of this began in 2017, when Pine City, N.Y., resident Mark Longo rescued P’Nut (aka: Peanut, aka: PNUT) after seeing the squirrel’s mother “get run over by a car”.

According to Longo, he initially had no intention of keeping P’Nut but couldn’t find an animal rescue to care for him, so he bottle-fed the squirrel for eight months before releasing him into the wild.

That plan didn’t go so well. As Longo told USA Today in July 2022:

I released him in the backyard, and a day and a half later, I found him sitting on my porch, missing half his tail. So here I am, balling my eyes out, like I failed you as your human. ... And I kind of opened the door, he ran inside, and that was the last of Peanut's wildlife career.

The squirrel joined a household that included Longo, his wife, and Chloe the cat, and P’Nut quickly developed quite the social media presence, with an Instagram account that currently has 694,000 followers (up from 534,000 on Saturday) and millions of TikTok views.

In 2023, Longo established “P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary”, which now boasts a number of rescued horses, four cows, three alpacas, and assorted “ducks, chickens, geese, & quail”.

A few months back, Longo also took possession of Fred, a racoon who was dropped off on his doorstep and who quickly shared living quarters with the Longo brood (Longo himself claimed that he planned to release Fred into the wild once he recuperated).

Enter the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and County Health. That’s more or less where things stood on October 30, when the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the Chemung County Department of Health showed up at Longo’s house.

Apparently, there are rules in the Empire State that prohibit most people from keeping wild animals, and officers from the two organizations were there to enforce them. As CBS News explained:

Under state law, the only way to legally rescue squirrels is to become a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, a process that can take months, and to legally keep a domesticated wild animal, it also has to be registered to be an educational animal.

Longo contends he was in the process of complying with those requirements, and just needed additional guidance from DEC, but in any event, officers allegedly spent hours on Longo’s property and seized both P’Nut and Fred, both of whom was thereafter euthanized.

The New York Post quoted Longo on his account of that raid:

They treated me like I was a terrorist. They treated this raid as if I was a drug dealer. They ransacked my house for five hours. They asked my wife, who is of German descent, what her immigration status was. They asked if I had cameras in my house. They wouldn’t allow me to go to the bathroom without a police escort, who then checked the back of the toilet to see if I was hiding anything there.

Shades of the “Louis’ Restaurant” scene in The Godfather there. Bureaucrats are going to act like bureaucrats I assume, and there are always at least two sides to any story, but a first blush it all seems excessive.

For their part, DEC and the county health department issued a joint statement that read in part:

On Oct. 30, DEC seized a raccoon and squirrel sharing a residence with humans, creating the potential for human exposure to rabies. In addition, a person involved with the investigation was bitten by the squirrel. To test for rabies, both animals were euthanized. ... The animals are being tested for rabies and anyone who has been in contact with these animals is strongly encouraged to consult their physician.

Rabies is a serious issue, and Chemung County recently issued an alert for the virus. As the CDC explains:

Rabies virus infection, regardless of the variant or animal reservoir, is fatal in over 99% of cases, making it one of the world’s most deadly diseases. There is no treatment once signs or symptoms of the disease begin, and the disease is fatal in humans and animals within 1–2 weeks of symptom onset.

“New York Bureaucrats Get Their Squirrel, P’Nut”. All of that said, news of the Longo raid and the state’s killing of P’Nut and Fred has taken on a life of its own.

Even the editorial board of the staid Wall Street Journal felt obligated to issue an opinion piece on the incident, headlined “New York Bureaucrats Get Their Squirrel, P’Nut”, which balanced the treatment P’Nut and Fred received against the state’s more permissive response to human crime:

The P’Nut incident has exploded on social media as an example of abusive government, and it’s hard to conclude otherwise if Mr. Longo’s account is accurate. The 34-year-old had better watch out now that he’s gone public, because there’s nobody more vengeful than a bureaucracy that’s been embarrassed when its bullying zealotry is exposed.

Too bad for P’Nut he didn’t steal sundries from a drug store. He’d already be back safely at home.

Elon Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) about the incident to make any number of points, with this one being the least politically charged:

And so did the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee:

Simply put, regardless of whether you have an axe to grind about government overreach, the Second Amendment, government priorities, or most any point, P’Nut’s metaphorical headstone offers as good a whetstone as any.

“Mass Deportations”. Keep all of this in mind as Donald Trump promises to implement a “mass deportation” plan if he is again elected president.

Opponents of such a program (and most immigration enforcement generally) are already lining up the reasons why it’s a bad idea: It would be costly; would separate families; would require “sweeping raids” and “giant camps”; would hurt the economy and “leave schools to help millions of students”.

That nearly all of these complaints are overblown is beside the point. As GOP vice presidential candidate (and current Ohio senator) J.D. Vance explained the plan in mid-October:

People always say, Well, isn't it really difficult logistically to get all these illegal immigrants out of the country? Well, first of all, the first thing you have to do is stop bleeding. ... The second thing is, okay, well, ‘now that we've gotten illegal immigration as close to zero as physically possible, what are you and President Trump going to do about the 20 million illegal aliens who are here?’ And I think of it, it's kind of like somebody asking me, well, that's a really big sandwich. It's 10 times the size of your mouth. How are you possibly going to eat the whole thing?

. . .

Let's start with the first million who are the most violent criminals, who are the most aggressive. Get them out of here. First prioritize them, and then you see where you are, and you keep on taking bites of the problem, until you get illegal immigration to a serviceable point.

While there likely isn’t much of a constituency supporting the cause of violent alien criminals, there’s a vocal minority of people who oppose any removals, period, and they will likely elide the finer details when the initial arrests Vance describes occur.

As such a program expands, expect others (including in the media) to join that chorus, highlighting the circumstances under which removable aliens are arrested (“while preparing to take his children to school”; “while returning from a 10-hour shift caring for the elderly”), their family ties (“the father of three U.S. citizens”); and their community involvement (“other members of his church are holding a prayer vigil”).

None of this is to suggest I am a prophet or a seer — I’ve simply been doing this for decades, and I’ve seen the movie enough times to tell you how it ends.

Nor am I suggesting that there isn’t any merit to such a plan or that it is infeasible.

Rather, it’s to say that when it comes to enforcement, how something is done is usually as important as whether it’s done at all, and if any large-scale immigration enforcement plan comes off as ham-fisted or (worse) unduly or senselessly bureaucratic, it’s likely going to lose popular support quickly.

That’s the part that DEC seems to have missed. Rabies is deadly, but raiding a person’s home to seize and kill a domesticated squirrel that’s a social-media star to stem the unlikely spread of the disease is stupid, and nobody supports — let alone wants to pay for — stupid enforcement.

As Nobel laureate Bob Dylan has explained: “We live in a political world/ Turning and a-thrashing about/As soon as you’re awake, you’re trained to take/What looks like the easy way out”.

A majority of Americans currently support deporting aliens here illegally, and Trump has made it a key part of his campaign. If he’s elected and implements that program, he shouldn’t lose track of the optics of how it’s carried out — and remember the great P’Nut backlash.