Peanut and Puppycide

In the waning moments of the 2024 election, Peanut, a squirrel, went viral. A wildlife rescue, Peanut had been unable to go back to being a wild animal after his rehabilitation. His owner, Mark Longo adopted him as a pet. His heart-warming interactions with his human family earned the adorable rodent celebrity status, including nearly one million followers on Instagram. 

“Following anonymous complaints over rabies fears” Peanut was confiscated and put to death by New York state health officials. The heavy-handed actions by the State prompted a massive backlash from animal lovers. A Change.org petition calling for justice has over 73,000 signatures. A crowd-funding campaign for the benefit of a wildlife sanctuary in memory of the charismatic furball has raised over $224,000 at the time of this writing. The New York Post reported: 

The squirrel’s death has sparked so much fury that it prompted a state lawmaker to propose legislation to improve animal rights statutes — calling the bill “Peanut’s Law: Humane Animal Protection Act.”…The outcry also triggered the outpouring of donations, as well as the hashtag #Justice4Peanut to spread on social media. 

l’Affaire Peanut recalls the “puppycide” movement of the previous decade. Awareness of the epidemic of police officers shooting dogs rose, peaked in the mid-teens, and has since almost vanished. The movement was driven by concerns that aggressive law enforcement was taking out pets that were, for the most part harmless, as routine operational procedures, regardless of any actual danger to the officer. 

Legal scholar Courtney G. Lee in a 2018 law review article titled More than Just Collateral Damage: Pet Shootings by Police wrote:

The Department of Justice estimates that American police officers shoot 10,000 pet dogs in the line of duty each year. It is impossible to ascertain a reliable number, however, because most law enforcement agencies do not maintain accurate records of animal killings. The tally may be substantially higher, and some suggest it could reach six figures.

Deferring to officers’ judgment when they reasonably fear for human safety is sound policy because they regularly must make split-second, life-or-death decisions in highly stressful situations; but many pet shootings occur when officers mistake the behavior of a friendly, curious dog for aggression. Further, some animals have been deliberately shot and killed under questionable circumstances, including through doors or while tied, running away, or hiding. Studies show that some officers shoot pets unnecessarily, recklessly, or in retaliation, and that subsequent civilian complaints are investigated inadequately. Moreover, not every animal that police officers shoot is a large dog that may be more likely to pose a genuine risk to human safety—or even a dog at all. Police claiming a threat to human safety have shot puppies, Chihuahuas, Miniature Dachshunds, and domestic cats, among other pets. In some tragic cases, bullets missed their nonhuman targets and injured or even killed human bystanders instead.

Lee’s paper cites data that “animals are involved in the majority of instances when officers discharge their firearms.” Think about that for a moment. If the data is correct, more pets are killed than the combined total of humans, inanimate objects shot at, and bullets that miss.

Lee adds that “police shootings of domesticated animals that allegedly pose a threat to safety implicate many different species, ranging from pigs, to goats, and even to cats.” In fairness to police, who must operate in dangerous situations, an aggressive dog could attack an officer. Drug dealers allegedly keep pit bulls for exactly this reason. And people from all walks of life are injured—even killed—by dogs. But what is the danger to officer safety presented by pigs? How many officers have been injured in the line of duty by a goat, an animal not known for aggression? (Some goats participate in yoga classes).

The puppycide movement at its peak consisted of a range of advocacy groups. The puppycide database, a project founded to create a public record of animal shootings, used public records, news stories, and interviews to compile evidence of nearly 3,000 incidents of police killings of pets. The Marshall Project, a non-profit devoted to impacting criminal justice reforms in the US through journalism, has a curated page of links about police shooting dogs. One representative recent piece was the Washington Post’s An officer was called to help a blind, deaf dog. He shot him instead.

The ACLU in 2015 published War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Police. The report was primarily concerned with the militarization of policing. The report criticized tactics such as sending SWAT teams, which are frequently dispatched for routine policing issues, and even in cases where evidence was weak that the recipient was either violent or had broken the law. 

A typical story from the ACLU is:

Officers had no reason to believe that the man they suspected of selling marijuana out of his home was armed. Yet, they still classified their investigation as “high risk” to justify deploying a SWAT team. Instead of knocking and demanding to search the premises, the SWAT team burst into the man’s home, igniting a flashbang grenade, shattering a window, and breaking down the man’s front door. 

The ACLU found that “it is not unusual for family pets to be shot unnecessarily.” The report highlights several such cases involving a dog, such as:

The year before [a reform was passed], the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s SWAT team had raided the home of Cheye Calvo, the mayor of a small Prince George’s County municipality. The county police department then held Calvo and his family at gunpoint for hours and killed his two dogs, on the basis of a misguided investigation in which Calvo and his wife were wrongly suspected of being involved in a marijuana transaction.

The libertarian Reason magazine (online) has published hundreds of articles tagged “puppycide.” One of many is headlined A Missouri Cop Shot a Family’s Dog and Threw Its Body in a Ditch. The story covers “a 9-year-old lab mix (who) wandered away from home during a storm. When a neighbor called the police to help find the dog’s family, cops shot the pup instead.” Not all of the tagged stories directly involved a dog being shot. Take, for example, Tina Hight, who herself was shot when Columbus County Arkansas law enforcement was aiming for her dog. 

Outside of Reason (whose archived pieces go back prior to 2012 and continue up to the current year), the puppycide movement has largely vanished. The Marshall Project page has been updated as recently as May of 2024, but it contains hardly more than a dozen links since 2016. The PuppycideDB is no longer active. Their open-source database has not been updated in eight years. The now-defunct Ozymandias media launched a Kickstarter in 2016 to fund a documentary on this issue with the pitch “Every 98 minutes, a dog is shot by law enforcement. Help us tell their stories.” The Kickstarter appears to have failed and the film was never made. During the peak of this movement, at best only minor reforms were achieved. 

What we find particularly painful about pet murders is that, whatever the crimes owners may be suspected of, the pets themselves are innocent. In fact, the abuse of animals is itself a crime in all fifty US states. What, then, is the explanation of this campaign of companion animals mass murder? In the Western political tradition, murdering harmless pets is not considered a legitimate function of government. To understand this ongoing problem, we must look at theories of state dysfunction. 

First, we will examine Samuel Francis’ concept of anarcho-tyranny. 

This condition…is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent.

And: 

Yet at the same time, the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy. But that semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state. The result is what seems to be the first society in history in which elements of both anarchy and tyranny pertain at the same time and seem to be closely connected with each other and to constitute, more or less, opposite sides of the same coin.

Peanut’s owner Mark Longo says roughly the same thing: 

We used resources from this state to kill a squirrel and raccoon and raid my house as if I was a drug dealer. We have resources to kill a raccoon and a squirrel, but we can’t fix the major bridges down the street? I am appalled.” 

The danger posed by a pet squirrel, according to the authorities, was the spread of rabies. Were such heavy-handed measures needed to contain a possible outbreak? A doctor with expertise in infectious diseases says that rabies was unlikely and that there were other options than putting Peanut to death. It is likely that the most destructive alternative was chosen. In any case, rabies only became an issue because Peanut allegedly bit a conservation worker who only became involved because some busybody had called in a complaint: owner Longo was reported for harboring illegal wildlife. The caller might have been in a different US state than the animal, and if so, was not at any risk. 

Readers of this site might recall another incident in recent history involving government overreach in an effort to control a virus. In the Covid panic, a massive armada of ineffective methods were deployed against a respiratory virus. The tsunami of nonsensical strategies included wearing masks—outdoors—that don’t filter viral aerosols, half-hearted lockdowns (excluding large retail outlets and marijuana dispensaries), school shutdowns, and a so-called vaccine that did not stop transmission or infection. The massive failure of these pointless precautions caused enormous damage to everyone in pursuit of earning a living, mental health, family life, career, art, athletics, education, and worship.

The public health authorities clearly know that these methods did not work. The elites, including the governors of the most locked-down states, ignored the measure with impunity and continued to live their lives normally. Deliberate cultivation of fear by behavioral scientists was used to promote compliance anyway. In an article about the German response:

At the time the lockdowns were implemented, [the main public health agency] leaders knew the seasonal peak in respiratory illness was on its way out. However, in their internal communications they stated: “You can see that the curve is slowly leveling off, but we should avoid drawing attention to this in our external communications, to encourage compliance with measures.” Likewise, they also believed COVID-19 was less dangerous than the flu and that there was no justification to keep children out of schools.

This meant the lockdowns were utterly unnecessary (as COVID would disappear on its own).

If those in command knew that it was all fake, what, then, was their purpose? Francis identified punishment of the non-compliant as the real purpose of the tyranny component. His list of the targeted elements of society begins with “people who do not like to pay taxes, wear seat belts, or deliver their children to the mind-bending therapists who run the public schools.” The obvious additions are those who will not wear masks, stay at home, or accept untested vaccinations, and those with pet squirrels. 

Francis’ theory only goes partway toward explaining the pet genocide as policy. Francis’ examples primarily demonstrate administrative excess. Shooting pets is closer to the terror of Stalin’s The Great Purge. In the purge’s one year, over 100,000 Russians were accused of political crimes and put to death. Wikipedia explains that later investigations showed that the condemned were innocent—of anything. 

Randomness is a feature not a bug of state terror. Without the necessity of having broken a law in order to be guilty, anyone can become a target for any reason. The death of innocent people was intended to create fear—and compliance. 

Randomness was also a key aspect of Covid propaganda. We were told constantly that we all must comply with the measures because we were all—equally—at risk. We were told that everyone must wear a mask. We were told that no one could be safe until everyone was fully injected. We were told that the unvaccinated could not work in the same workplace because they might infect the vaccinated (which makes no sense at all if the vaccine stopped infection). 

The randomness narrative around Covid was imposed on a reality of highly specific non-random vulnerability. The existence of a steep age gradient was denied. The survival of those with adequate vitamin D levels was ignored. A commonsense proposal to focus protection on the old, sick, and obese while the rest of us would go about our lives was the subject of a harsh counter-propaganda effort. 

The seven blind men have detected features of the problem without realizing that it is an elephant. The puppycide movement made a good effort to increase awareness of harm to dogs but was aimed primarily at the welfare of animals. The ACLU took it one step further, situating violence against our pets within the larger scope of the militarization of policing. While the ACLU was directionally correct, policing is still downstream of something more fundamental.

Nearly all pet owners consider pets to be family members. While the stated goal of pet execution is to avoid harm to the SWAT team members, discharging a firearm in the direction of a family pet is intended to terrorize the owner. The defenders of dogs did not realize that we are the target and the animals are our proxies. 

As our governance systems have increasingly become divorced from public oversight, transparency, and democratic controls, they are losing. Not only have the organized political structure forms (elected and administrative) been corrupted. Former parts of civil society such as the media and health have become governmentalities. These institutions have all burned their trust capital by constantly lying. They are now facing trust bankruptcy and the associated restructuring. Cooperation which was formerly voluntary out of pro-social inclinations toward harmony and being a good neighbor is no longer earned. Compliance, which must be forced, replaces cooperation. When compliance is resisted, the resistance becomes the target.