PINE CITY, N.Y. (WETM) -- The owner of social media icon, 'P'nut the Squirrel,' spoke out to FOX 8 sister station, 18 News, on Thursday less than a day after DEC agents arrived at his house with a search warrant, seizing the squirrel and a raccoon.
Mark Longo, the owner of P'Nut's Freedom Farm is looking for answers after he said state authorities left him and his wife in the dark about what happened to 7-year-old P'Nut, their pet gray squirrel, who was seized on Wednesday, Oct. 30, in a warrant search of their Pine City home.
Between six and eight New York State Department of Environmental Conservation officers arrived at Longo's house on Wednesday and presented him with a search warrant to locate P'Nut and a raccoon named Fred, Longo said.
Officers spent hours inside the farmhouse searching every part of the home, with Longo saying it was something he never experienced before.
"We weren't allowed to move, we were police escorted to use the bathroom," Longo said, "Mind you this is a search warrant for a squirrel and a raccoon, and I feel like this was a little bit of an overkill, but that's just my opinion, was pretty devastating to go through that," he said.
Longo provided 18 News with the search warrant, saying officers were authorized to search the entire property and seize an "unlawfully possessed" gray squirrel, a raccoon, and any other unlawfully possessed wildlife.
"They went through every portion of my property to find two animals," Longo said, "Every crevis of this house was searched," he said. Longo continued by saying there were many items he still needed to put back into closets and clean up soap and shampoo bottles that were broken in his bathroom.
Officers found the animals and took them but have yet to provide Longo and his wife any information on what happened to them.
"Since they left I have not heard from a single state official or any of the DEC officers that were here," Longo said. "I just want answers, I want to comply, I wanna be able to get the permits and everything involving P'Nut to be back in his home and I just want the opportunity to have that," he said.
Longo was in the process of getting the appropriate permits needed to keep P'Nut in New York State after moving from Connecticut in 2023 but said there was no guidance on the state. Longo wanted to use P'Nut as an educational animal and show the pros and cons of squirrels and why they shouldn't be household pets.
"We didn't know which portion we were supposed to go in, maybe it's a little bit of ignorance because we had seven years of P'Nut," Longo said. "I've never had a complaint for P'Nut, yes it's a different state, but again, we weren't trying to hide P'Nut," he said, "this wasn't something we were, 'shh, don't tell anybody we have a squirrel,' this was a way for us to use an animal to help other animals," Longo said.
In a statement on Wednesday, the DEC said that two animals were seized in coordination with the Chemung County Health Department due to the presence of a rabies vector species (raccoon) in the home.
Longo said that Fred the raccoon was being rehabilitated in the home before plans were to release him into the 251 acres of woods behind his house. He mentioned the raccoon didn't have rabies and neither did Peanut.
A Change.org petition was started by the community in hopes of getting P'Nut back home. As of the writing of this article, the petition has more than 18,000 signatures.
Longo adopted P'Nut after seeing the squirrel's mother get hit by a car. Longo rehabilitated P'Nut and kept him as a pet after he was deemed unreleasable. Longo owned the squirrel for seven years, and his social media accounts dedicated to P'Nut developed a large following. Peanut the Squirrel currently has more than 532,000 followers on Instagram, and A Squirrel Named Peanut has more than 423,000 followers on Facebook.