It was totally nuts!
A rabies expert called New York authorities “insane” for killing P’Nut the Squirrel – saying the state could have figured out if the animal was dangerous without chopping his head off.
Infectious disease specialist Dr. Edward R. Rensimer told The Post the odds were “virtually zero” that P’Nut and his pal Fred the Raccoon had rabies despite state agents seizing the animals in October and then putting them down to test for the disease.
“There have been no squirrel to human rabies transmission ever documented in this country,” said Rensimer, a Texas infectious disease specialist who has been studying rabies for decades.
“I can’t imagine, frankly, what their thinking was, if they knew anything about this area,” he added.
The social-media famous pet squirrel and Fred — a young raccoon kit being nursed back to strength — were euthanized by the Department of Environmental Conservation in October just hours after they were seized from the upstate home of caretaker Mark Longo, who runs an animal sanctuary on his property.
DEC officials claimed the animals were taken because Longo was housing them without a permit, and that a rabies test became necessary after P’Nut allegedly bit an agent on the thumb through two pairs of protective gloves — but the state’s own rabies information supports Rensimer’s assessment that the risk of infection was nearly non-existent.
“Some animals almost never get rabies,” the New York Department of Health states on its rabies fact sheet — specifically naming “small rodents such as squirrels” as only ever catching it under “rare circumstances.”
And while raccoons are generally agreed to be more prevalent carriers, the actual number of confirmed cases appears to be extremely low, according to data collected by New York state. There were just 35 lab-confirmed cases of rabies in raccoons in the 17 years since records were first kept in 2007, the data show.
In Chemung County, where P’Nut and Fred were killed, there was just one confirmed rabies case in a raccoon during all that time. And the state has no available records of rabies ever being found in a squirrel.
“The [Center for Disease Control] doesn’t even consider squirrel bites reportable,” Rensimer said.
Even if officials were afraid Fred — who was left on Longo’s doorstep months ago in dire need of care — might have had rabies and transferred it to P’Nut, Rensimer said the way rabies symptoms show made killing the animals as a first resort “a ridiculous response.”
While the exact timeline for rabies infections in raccoons and squirrels is not entirely known, Rensimer said similarly sized animals like cats, dogs, and ferrets will almost always show symptoms within 10 days.
As Fred had been in Longo’s care for well more than 10 days, and P’Nut had been living with him for seven years — facts readily available due to Longo’s widely viewed social media — there was ample evidence to suggest the animals were rabies-free.
“If a raccoon came to them as a frail little animal months ago, the chances it would still be alive with rabies is pretty slim,” Rensimer said, adding that quarantining the animals for 10 days to see if symptoms arose would have been a much more rational — and common — approach than decapitating them to perform a rabies test on their brains.
And even if the DEC agent was especially worried about rabies — which is typically fatal in humans once it reaches the brain — Rensimer said a bite to the hand from an infected animal would take about 45 days or longer to transmit to the brain.
“It’s not like he gets bitten on a Friday and he’s going to be dead on Sunday,” Rensimer said. “They had time to think this over. They could say, ‘You know what, there’s no emergency here. Let’s think this through.’
“A reasonable thing would have been to say to the guy, ‘How would you like to get rabies immunizations?’ Why would you kill the animal to study it to make sure it doesn’t have rabies?The odds it has rabies is virtually zero.”
Such a shot of rabies immunization after the bite would have completely neutralized any risk of infection, Rensimer said — adding that it seems extremely odd DEC agents tasked with handling animals wouldn’t be up to date on their vaccinations in the first place.
“It’s insane. It’s common sense. You don’t need to be a rabies expert to know that,” he said. “The whole thing smells badly. They had options, and they had time, and they didn’t exercise either one of them.”
Test results later showed that neither P’Nut nor Fred had rabies.
The DEC did not respond to request for comment on the agency’s employee immunization practices, and have still not provided any documentation that P’Nut bit anyone during the raid.
But all of the DEC’s explanations about squirrel bites and rabies fears were cast into doubt after The Post reported officials were plotting to euthanize P’Nut and Fred at least seven days before the supposed bite — and P’Nut’s caretaker has now filed claim to sue the state to find some answers.
“The alleged threat of rabies generally involves unjustified fear mongering overall, and it provides an unwarranted excuse to kill raccoons and other animals, that is really not based in reality,” Longo’s attorney, Nora Constance Marino, told The Post.
“It’s horrible and is outrageous, frankly. Trained DEC agents, department of health officials, or animal control officers, however, should know better. The fact that they didn’t, and went forward with executing these animals in a matter of hours, speaks volumes.”
Dr. Rensimer said something seemed amiss about the DEC’s behavior.
“They obviously didn’t break a sweat and trying to gather information to preserve these animals,” he said. “It sounds more to me like they had an agenda, and so they just created a fact basis around their agenda rather than doing the right thing.”