The death of Peanut the squirrel is indeed tragic, but almost as tragic is the eagerness of people like Pietro Geraci to hamhandedly exploit it for political gain.

Geraci informs us that he is the spokesman for the New York State Libertarian Party, which explains why his letter reads as you might expect one from the sort of people who enjoy grinding copies of Galt’s Speech into tiny white flakes and snorting them would, but it is not enough to merely note that.

You would never know from his letter that there is a thriving trade in poached wildlife as pets, sold via social media, as I’m sure our upstanding Texan citizen does. Mr. Geraci, even you would know, if you regularly read the Cuffs & Collars section of the New York Outdoor News, that EnCon officers around the state routinely confiscate such animals from people who ... meant well. Durat lex, sed lex.

It is true that squirrel-to-human rabies transmissions are not known to have happened. But that is not the same thing as saying they are impossible—it’s rather like concluding that it’s safe to bicycle an interstate highway because there’s no known case of someone getting hurt or killed that way. More sane people might conclude that, as with the low interstate bicycle accident death rate, humans do not get rabies from squirrels because so few people are dumb enough to keep them as pets for the social-media likes. A high-school science teacher should be expected to understand this if they are to do right by their students and their employer.

There is no such qualification, alas, to Mr. Geraci’s ascientific claim that, since Peanut wasn’t showing any symptoms of rabies in Mr. Longo’s Instagram posts, he wasn’t. So, apparently, some meatball doing a “simple Google search” from miles away is a diagnostic tool that overrides any veterinary expertise on the scene? I should again think the logic regrettably simple in this case that, if an animal not known to have received a rabies shot but potentially vulnerable to infection bites a human, that animal needs to be tested for rabies. Even if the only way to do it is sectioning its brain. Here, actually, a “simple Google search” will yield a plenitude of horrific detail about the course of a rabies infection in humans if not treated promptly (Spoiler: Once the symptoms appear, you will die slowly).

But perhaps, judging from his language about the DEC “henchman”, Mr. Geraci feels the EnCon officer deserved such an ignominious fate for choosing to work for the state, rather like the way we used to say that women deserved to be raped for wearing short skirts. Well then ... I guess there can be no debate that Mr. Geraci, like so many others of his ilk, hates cops. Green Lives Matter, too, as much as black, blue or white ones, and Geraci owes every DEC officer (whom those of us who have for various reasons benefited from their work patrolling state lands and their other enforcement responsibilities know to be unfailingly professional and competent in their duties) a swift apology.

I should, in closing, share that I can, to some degree, understand where the Longos were coming from. For 18 years, my wife and I wound up keeping as a pet a female cardinal who had been brought to her by a prison inmate when the bird’s broken wing had healed and she could no longer be cared for in his cell. Returned to the wild, she would have been hawk food very swiftly as she was unable to fly. Newbie, as we named her, instead lived out her life quite comfortably with several cockatiels as company. I believe this was legal under the federal Migratory Bird Act, since we never had any intent of transferring her to another for personal gain, but I admit I’m not certain of that interpretation. However, we never worried about her being taken away from us because, unlike the Longos, we had the good sense to not pimp her out on social media.