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.

  • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    10 days ago

    How long?

    Ferrets can incubate for almost 6 months.

    Possums can carry forever with a dormant infection.

    Can the animal’s immune system defeat the infection entirely, or merely send it back to a carrier state? How do you characterize the behavior of the species in different stages of infection?

    We don’t know, because experimenting on these fuckers is nightmarishly dangerous, and we would have to test literally each mammal.

    The plan is to wipe out rabies forever so we never have to deal with it, which is what happened in Europe, and which we could do here except our livestock tend to graze alongside wild animals.

      • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        10 days ago

        They basically ended it in Europe and Australia.

        Also, incidence has plummeted incredibly over the past century, though we had an uptick a decade ago.

        We could effectively eliminate it, but the greatest generation cared about that, they feared it rightfully, we don’t anymore.

        The reason it’s coming back is just complacency.