When people complain about how much they must spend in taxes, big government Democrats often mock them. Who, then, is going to fix the roads? Or keep schools running? Or launch SWAT team raids to detain and execute people’s pet squirrels?
That last one is what your tax money helps fund if you are a New Yorker, at least. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation recently launched a raid to capture the pet squirrel and pet raccoon of one New York family. According to the owner of Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon, 10 New York government agents raided his home for five hours and interrogated his wife about her immigration status, all to find out what other illegal animal pets he was suspected of hiding.
The New York government was apparently acting on anonymous complaints and the possibility that Fred and Peanut had rabies, on the assumption that they are dirty pest animals that are predisposed to get rabies. Owner Mark Longo had kept both as rescues, housing Fred for four months and Peanut for seven years, either in his house or in an outdoor enclosure, making interaction with animals with the rabies virus nearly impossible. Longo, in fact, runs an animal sanctuary named after Peanut. It is safe to say he has a better grasp of animal safety than New York bureaucrats do.
In fact, those New York bureaucrats apparently didn’t know that animals with rabies typically die within three to 14 days of symptoms, meaning it is safe to say neither Fred nor Peanut was rabid. So, when an agent was bitten by the squirrel while forcibly removing it from its home, as is apt to happen when you try to abduct pets from their owners and their homes, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation decided that the best thing to do would be to test them for rabies. That requires killing the animals, and so that is what New York did. Consider the environment conserved.
Luckily, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has received more than $10 billion in funding from New Yorker taxpayer dollars over the past two years, right? Would you feel safer if New York environmental bureaucrats couldn’t send multiple agents to raid your house, confiscate and execute your pets, and tacitly threaten to deport your wife?
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You would think that those billions would give the department better education about how rabies is transmitted and how quickly it kills animals (raccoons hit the shorter end of the day range, lasting three days after symptoms), but instead, they are evidently used to prepare for and fund these raids on the event fugitive domesticated rescue squirrels are hiding out there in their rescue sanctuaries.
New York may be unwilling to use that money to address crime or house the illegal immigrants it encourages to cross the border, but at least New Yorkers can sleep easy knowing definitely-not-rabid squirrels will get the death penalty when scooped up in these environmental conservation raids. Think about that the next time you think the state is taking too much of your money in taxes.