The Peanut Effect: How One Dead Squirrel Upended New York Wildlife Enforcement

The smoggy, litter-swept stretch of the Cross Bronx Expressway leading to the Throgs Neck Bridge is not a place you’d expect to find a police checkpoint for illegal hunting.

But each fall, it becomes a hot spot for state environmental officers — some in jungle-green uniforms and Stetson-style hats — who stop camo-clad hunters on their way home to Long Island, all in search of illicit game.

Officers check dead deer stashed in the beds of pickup trucks for the proper tags and try to determine if they were illegally hauled over state lines. Firearms must be unloaded and properly stored. Lawbreakers receive a ticket or a summons. On a busy day in 2021, officers with the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation inspected 82 deer and three bears, along with 176 guns.

These so-called deer checks are a staple of New York’s hunting season, from crowded, six-lane highways to rural stretches of the Adirondacks. Yet last November, there were no checkpoints on the Cross Bronx or many of the other routes where they’re usually found. The reason had little to do with deer, bears or hunting regulations.

The cause, at least in part, was a famous, cowboy-hat-wearing pet squirrel with hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram, according to the environmental conservation officers’ union. Wildlife officers were facing widespread threats after government authorities seized and killed the squirrel less than a week before last year’s presidential election.

By now, the basic outlines of Peanut the squirrel’s story are well known. His capture and subsequent death at the hands of by-the-book government officials kindled the flames of an internet culture war, sparking outrage not just among his animal-loving fans, but within the top echelons of conservative politics and media. Elon Musk weighed in on Joe Rogan’s podcast, calling it “government overreach.” JD Vance spoke about Peanut’s death on the campaign trail.

The online fervor eventually faded, but its effect on New York’s environmental enforcers remains.

A review of hundreds of documents and voicemails obtained through an open-records request, along with interviews, reveals new details about the backlash to Peanut’s killing. It shows that the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation received a tidal wave of death threats and bomb scares that rattled top officials, according to rank-and-file officers, and had a lasting effect on their ability to enforce the state’s environmental laws.

“ We were essentially handcuffed to do our jobs after that,” said Matthew Krug, vice president of the Police Benevolent Association of New York State.

DEC officers remain frustrated that their bosses didn’t do more to explain to the public why they seized the squirrel, an explanation that might have helped stem the avalanche of threats that followed, the union representative said. Internal directives show officers now face added layers of review before seeking warrants or seizing illegal wildlife.

Through a spokesperson, DEC leaders declined to be interviewed for this story. But Krug, whose union represents nearly 300 DEC police officers, said the “post-Peanut effect” is still felt within the agency.

Peanut’s humble beginnings
Mark Longo is a muscular 35-year-old with a sleeve of tattoos and a perpetual 5 o’clock shadow. He tells his dead pet squirrel’s story on Instagram Live almost every day, often broadcasting from a room filled with floor-to-ceiling memorabilia made by fans. (He said he started spelling the squirrel’s name “P’Nut” a few years ago to make it more distinct.)

Longo and his wife, Daniela Bittner, live on a 311-acre farm in Pine City — a hamlet of about 4,500 people located four hours northwest of Manhattan. P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary, as the property is known, is home to more than 300 animals, including horses, ducks, goats, chickens, geese and dogs, many of which are rescues, according to Longo.

“ It’s so crazy to see what the government is capable of doing, and we caught them with their pants down, y’all,” Longo said on Instagram Live in May, soliciting donations for his farm and taking questions from viewers.

By Longo’s telling, he was living in Connecticut and working for a building inspections company around seven years ago when he came across a baby squirrel in the middle of the street in Midtown. An adult squirrel — presumably the baby’s mother — was killed by a car nearby.

Longo said he rescued the baby squirrel and named him Peanut. He bottle-fed the squirrel for eight months and attempted to release him into the wild. But the rodent returned home with a chunk of its tail missing.

Longo posted footage of the squirrel playing with Chloe, his cat. Other times, he recorded Peanut nibbling at a waffle, or wearing a tiny cowboy hat while holding a sign with a joke. “Paint me like one of your French squirrels,” one of the signs read. A social media star was born.

The squirrel racked up hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and millions of likes on TikTok, getting a huge boost from a 2022 feature — “Guy and Rescued Squirrel Do Everything Together” — on the animal-centric online platform The Dodo.

In 2023, Longo bought the farm in rural New York and started a nonprofit animal-rescue organization.

“My wife and I sat down and said, you know what? We have a squirrel who’s made a really big impact on social media,” Longo said. “How can we utilize his platform to go out and help advocate for more animals?”

But Peanut’s rise to fame was complicated by one major issue: It’s illegal to keep a squirrel as a pet in New York. And you need a license if you want to rehab them for release into the wild or keep them for educational purposes.

Longo didn’t have a license. And he wasn’t exactly keeping a low profile.

Peanut in the spotlight
As vice president of his union and an active DEC officer, Krug had firsthand experience with the fallout from the confiscation of the squirrel.

“We followed the book,” Krug told Gothamist, part of the New York Public News Network, as he recounted the investigative steps involving the rodent. “We got a warrant. We followed our procedures.”

According to state documents obtained by Gothamist, officers received complaints in early 2024 alleging Longo was in illegal possession of the squirrel. The complainants pointed to easily obtained evidence: the hugely popular social media videos.

Longo was using Peanut to “generate followers to sell their explicit pornography,” the complaint stated. While Longo’s OnlyFans handle “Squirrel_Daddy” notes he’s “Peanut’s dad,” he insists the squirrel never appeared in any explicit content.

“Let’s face it — it’s 2025,” Longo told Gothamist. “A large majority of people between 20 and 40 have an OnlyFans page. It’s not illegal, it’s not a secret. … That’s normal life these days.”

In May, a DEC officer spoke with Longo by phone about the need for a rehabber license to possess a squirrel, according to the officer’s writeup of the call. Longo told him Peanut was back at his old house in Connecticut.

But Peanut kept showing up in videos. And when someone wrote in a fresh complaint, the officer politely encouraged the person to give it up.

No judge “will give us a search warrant for a squirrel,” the officer wrote in an email to the complainant.

“Unfortunately this isn’t a big crime, it is just a violation,” wrote the officer, whose name was redacted along with the name of the person who filed the complaint. “There is just nothing more I can do at this point. I am sorry.”

The situation changed in July 2024 when Longo introduced a new animal at the freedom farm: a raccoon named Fred, who crawled on Longo’s neck in a TikTok livestream for Peanut’s followers.

Like squirrels, it’s illegal to keep raccoons as pets in New York. Unlike squirrels, raccoons are considered a “rabies vector species” known to carry the virus, sometimes without exhibiting any symptoms.

By August, Longo and his wife had passed the state’s wildlife rehabber test, the first step toward getting a license to rehab an animal for release into the wild. But they did not complete a state-mandated interview that’s required before a license is issued, according to the DEC. Plus, a rehabber’s license wouldn’t allow the couple to keep a squirrel as a pet — or care for a rabies vector species like a raccoon.

DEC decided it was time to act.

“Some people may or may not know [rabies] is, like, 99.999% fatal in people and animals when they get it,” Krug said. “So it’s not something that we mess around with in any sort of way.”

On Oct. 29, DEC officers got a state judge, Richard Rich Jr., to sign a warrant to search Longo’s home for a squirrel, raccoon and “any other unlawfully possessed wildlife.”

They made their move the next day.

Searched and seized
When roughly a dozen DEC employees arrived at Longo’s home around 10:35 a.m., he urged his wife to hide Peanut and Fred.

He told the officers they wouldn’t find any wildlife inside.

“ I lied right to their face,” he said. “Anybody in my position would’ve done the same thing. We love our animals unconditionally and you have 12 people in front of you, you have no idea who they are, and they have guns.”

Longo had guns, too.DEC officers found several firearms in his home, state records show. Krug said an assault-style rifle was on a chair in a dining area, and officers suspected it did not comply with the state’s gun-control laws. DEC photos show the barrel was only 13 inches long, short of the state-mandated 16 inches. Longo put officers in touch with the person he said was the actual owner of the gun, according to state records.

The officers found Fred the raccoon in an unzipped suitcase inside a bedroom closet.

Peanut was in a jacuzzi-style bathtub, under a pile of clothes.

According to an officer’s write up from that day, Longo became “visibly upset” when they found Peanut. Longo said the animal was “a large source of income for the farm,” another officer wrote.

Longo remembered one officer looking him in the eye and saying: “It’s a squirrel now. It’s a raccoon. When is that snowball effect going to stop going down the hill?”

DEC documents show that before the raid, county and state health officials determined it was likely any wildlife living in the home with humans would likely have to be euthanized to test for rabies.

As a DEC wildlife biologist tried to put Peanut in a crate at Longo’s home, the squirrel’s fate was sealed.

Peanut bit the worker, leaving “a small wound on her finger,” according to the DEC officers’ writeups of the incident. The biologist wore two sets of protective gloves that showed no visible marks from the attack, according to the documents.

Longo does not believe Peanut bit the wildlife specialist, citing the lack of bite marks on her gloves.

After the bite, an officer contacted a county health official to ask whether to go through with the rabies test. The county official said yes. They “didn’t want to chance it,” one officer wrote.

An official on the scene took a picture of Peanut inside the crate. The famous critter has his back turned to the camera as a flashlight shined into the cage. It’s the last image of the squirrel alive.

Officials requested a “decap,” or decapitation, to test for rabies. Both Fred and Peanut tested negative.

Swift backlash
“To the group of people who called DEC, there’s a special place in hell for you,” Longo wrote on Instagram after the seizures.

National media outlets picked up the story. A GoFundMe page for Longo’s farm quickly racked up more than $250,000 in donations.

Prominent conservative figures and right-wing outlets latched on to the story in the final weeks of the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, painting Peanut as a victim of government overreach in a Democratic state.

Elon Musk, a major Trump supporter at the time, spoke about the squirrel on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.

“If they can do that with your pets, what do you think they can do to you?” Musk asked.

The comments helped fuel a vicious backlash that reached far beyond Peanut’s loyal audience on Instagram and TikTok.

A wave of internet users honed in on a woman named Monica Keasler, a photographer from Texas. They claimed she turned Peanut in to the authorities, fueled by a false accusation in a private Facebook group of squirrel rehabbers. At one point, Longo shared her image with Peanut’s followers. But the DEC has no record of Keasler filing a complaint.

It didn’t matter. Across the country, photographers named Monica — including in California, Texas and Ohio — were flooded with hateful comments and false reviews.

Monica Ann Hector, a Missouri photographer, said she had relied on Facebook to advertise her photography business. Then one day last November, her page was inundated with direct messages and comments falsely accusing her of snitching on Peanut — an animal she’d never heard of.

These days, she barely uses her Facebook page at all. Anytime she posts, she still gets a wave of Peanut-related comments, some of which she suspects are coming from bots.

“This has totally ruined my business,” she said, adding she used to shoot 15 to 20 weddings a year. As of this spring, she hadn’t booked any, resulting in a loss of around $25,000.

The Peanut fallout spread to 10 DEC buildings from New York City to Buffalo that received bomb threats. Officials received hundreds of emails and voicemails, some of which contained violent threats against DEC staff members and leaders, including Sean Mahar, the acting commissioner at the time.

One person left a voicemail saying he wanted to see DEC agents “laying dead in the f—ing street.” Another vowed to put a “bullet in the back of the head” of two officials, whom he named. Another called for the agents involved in the search to be executed on live television.

It caused a wave of panic and uncertainty within the agency, with its entire workforce — about 3,000 employees — permitted to work remotely for a few days.

Police officers provided security to threatened officials, even accompanying them as they dropped off their kids at school.

“Just the sheer amount of threats that were being called in and emailed in — some weren’t discovered for days or weeks afterwards,” Krug said. “Offices were essentially closed down.”

DEC leadership and Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office largely remained quiet in the days, weeks and months following Peanut’s seizure. As the public outcry grew, the agency said it was conducting an internal investigation.

On Nov. 3, Mahar issued an internal directive requiring that “no search warrants, or planned seizures or other high profile law enforcement initiatives can occur without prior discussion with, and approval from, the DEC interim commissioner and general counsel.”

More than a week after the incident, the DEC officers union — not the agency itself — issued a lengthy statement defending the officers’ actions. The statement said the public had been “greatly misled by a barrage of social media messaging that painted a partial picture of the investigation and triggered violent threats fueled by misinformation.”

Krug said the Peanut backlash has had a lasting effect.

There were the missing deer checkpoints at the Throgs Neck Bridge and at entry points into New York from Vermont and Pennsylvania, which Krug attributed in part to DEC leaders’ fear of sparking another viral uproar. As the threats poured in, the DEC sought to limit its workers’ public appearances.

“ DEC management, from my conversations with them, thought it was going to blow over right after the presidential election,” Krug said. “That wasn’t the case.”

In recent weeks, the DEC has provided officers in some parts of the state with a “Voluntary Consent to Forfeit Animal” form, a copy of which was obtained by Gothamist. The form, which officers would present to a person suspected of possessing illegal wildlife, asks the signer to acknowledge they “will not be regaining custody of the animal(s)” and that the animals may be euthanized to test for rabies.

Through early August, the DEC executed 20 search warrants in 2025, according to the agency.

In 2024, DEC officers and investigators executed at least 85 search warrants, according to the DEC. In actuality, the number was likely higher, since the agency didn’t start tracking the warrants executed by uniformed officers until after the Peanut ordeal.

In March, current DEC Commissioner Amanda Lefton — who took over that month — said the agency had completed its internal probe into the Peanut case.

Lefton said the agency will seek to equip its officers with body cameras and implement new procedures for animal seizures. She said the department understands “the distress caused to communities throughout our state.”

“We know that we can do better moving forward,” she said in a statement, without referring to the specifics of the case.

Krug said he still believes Longo should face charges for the firearm and possessing wildlife. Chemung County District Attorney Weeden Wetmore’s office did not return multiple messages seeking comment about the issue.

Longo has filed multiple lawsuits accusing the county, the state and its officers of negligence and violation of his constitutional rights. He’s seeking at least $10 million in damages tied to lost endorsements, advertising, donations to the animal sanctuary, sales of soap products featuring Peanut’s likeness and OnlyFans revenue.

“There’s nobody on this planet that can justify a 10-month investigation, five-hour raid with 12 people,” Longo said on Instagram in June.

Story by Jon Campbell/New York Public New Network
Jon Campbell covers the New York State Capitol for WNYC and Gothamist.

Image Credit: Mark Longo Instagram