The squirrel named P’Nut was rescued as a tiny baby, nursed to adulthood, and implausibly domesticated as a house pet by a couple living in New York. The couple took in another pet, a raccoon named Fred, who similarly became a beloved member of the household. Then, with the revenue they earned from social media fame, they started a licensed animal rescue service.
Alerted to their story, New York authorities somehow obtained a warrant from a judge to search the home and seize the animals. The invasion lasted five hours and the home was torn apart as the couple was forced to wait outside. Fred and P’Nut were seized and then (and shockingly) euthanized for fear of rabies, even though there was no evidence in either animal.
The incident is an unlikely candidate for obtaining this level of notoriety. But, as they say, cometh the hour, cometh the hero. A squirrel and a raccoon have emerged as mighty symbols of the excesses of public health. A profession born a century and a half ago, with a mandate to clear the water and streets, has become a wicked hegemon imposing itself on every aspect of human life.
The story caught on with the public because it illustrates the problem with an expansive vision of the public-health mandate. Once a government declares that it has arbitrary power to control infectious disease, it is implicitly claiming mastery over the entire microbial kingdom and everything in it.
More than a century ago, the same state government was on the hunt for Typhoid carriers, and found a poor Irish immigrant Mary Mallon, who was a cook. Though she carried no symptoms, cases of Typhoid seem to follow her. She was hardly the only carrier but the drive to isolate her, take away her job, and cut her open, became a fanatical campaign.
They hunted the person they called “Typhoid Mary” for many years, like a scene from “Les Miserables.” She ended up being forced into prison in isolation, held because she would not subject herself to the knife. There she stayed for a total of 30 years, and her name stuck and the legend persists to this day, mostly invoked as a reason why the state needs such powers.
Mary’s story came alive again, with proper historical context, during the war on a virus starting in 2020 and following, a respiratory infection stemming from a lab leak that spread and mutated quickly, even to animals. Containment was impossible but that did not stop authorities from shutting down economic life in most nations of the world.
Four and a half years later, we’ve still not had a public reckoning for what happened, even though the signs of damage are all around. Lifespans have been shortened, not because of the virus but rather the response, along with inflation, learning losses and the collapse of health generally. The result was a classic case of reverse consequences: in the name of protecting health, the opposite happened.
The much-needed reckoning that has not happened is leaking out in other ways: loss of public trust in institutions, political anger and upheaval, as well as the valorization of martyrs of whom there are many. But even with a possible millions of people injured by the shots, the stand-in symbol for them all has become an innocent squirrel and the right of a humane couple to show care for the little creature.
Such stories cannot be scripted. They emerge and seize the public mind in ways that defy elite intentions, and the phenomenon defies every possibility of prediction. It was this way with the Boston Tea Party as well as Rosa Parks’s refusal to sit in bus seating assigned by race. But the phenomenon of martyrs for a cause that ends up galvanizing social change goes back to the ancient world.
The Christian calendar offers a full day of recognition of the martyrs for the faith, people who chose death over compromise with their principles. The idea here is that while we cannot bring such heroes back, we can honor their memory with public prayers of appreciation for their sacrifice. The message of All Saints Day is that civilization requires sacrifice to preserve, because there will always be worldly powers who plot the rending of the fabric of the good life. They must be resisted.
The idea of martyrdom is that they are stand-ins for the rest of us. As they were treated, so too could we all be, unless change is made. It’s a mark of our times that the martyr in this case is a small squirrel but make no mistake: P’Nut is a metaphor for how individuals have been made to feel in our times, powerless, vulnerable, and sacrificed by powers that cannot be otherwise controlled.
I’m most familiar with the interesting story of St. Cecilia, a 3rd-century Roman of high birth and wealth who converted to Christianity along with her new husband. She was hunted and captured by the authorities and sentenced to death by a steaming that she somehow survived. After that, she was beheaded but still lived three days, during which time she was said to have sung praises to God.
In the iconography and art that appeared for the next 1,500 years, she appears with a harp and music, though we have no evidence she ever played and had no musical connections in her life. This is how martyrdom works: the memory of the sacrifice itself generates large stories that stick through the generations and operate as lasting examples.
This is why tyrants have always feared the marking of martyrs: their stories prove more powerful than all regimes and weaponry of a single generation.
Martyrdom teaches us a powerful lesson that heroic actions stand the test of time, as one generation passes the story to the next and becomes part of the immortal imagination of the human experience. Indeed, once you understand this, you see all the ancient legends from Greece and Rome and the religions surrounding them in a different light.
Such stories animate the historical trajectory, providing a powerful way to view what otherwise seems like randomized chaos. In the age of “science,” we might imagine that we do not need them anymore but that is clearly untrue. Civilization utterly requires metaphors and examples that rise above the daily media muck and regime priorities.
Speaking of science, one does wonder how, in its present form, it survives as the official faith of our age, in light of all that has transpired over these past few years. P’Nut the squirrel was sacrificed in the name of science and public health, same as so many others along with the institutions and businesses built over so many years. This calamity will not be forgotten, and the incident with this simple squirrel and humble raccoon could become the lesson that unravels the entire project.
This event unfolded over a weekend in which I was otherwise engaged in moderating panels and discussions on the problem of overweening state power in health, medicine, economics, and education. Hence, I paid no attention to media goings-on.
Emerging on the other side of our conference, I found that popular culture had made the point I had been making all along: it is deeply intrusive and threatening of the normal freedoms and rights a civilized people expect. It just so happens that this one story went “viral” and clarified the important issues in ways no article ever could.
Requiescat in Pace, P’Nut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon. May their deaths be impactful on the multitudes in the same way their lives touched those who were blessed to know them.
