Peanut, an orphaned squirrel who became a social media sensation after being rescued by a New York couple, was euthanized by the State of New York this week.
His crime? Being a squirrel.
“Peanut was an indoor squirrel, not harming anybody,” Mark Longo, one of Peanut’s owners, told TMZ on Friday. “He’s been with us for seven years. Not a single complaint was ever filed,” he added.
You can’t say the same about President Joe Biden’s German Shepherds, Major and Commander, whose history of attacking innocent bystanders has long cast a pall over the White House.
Major, the older of the dogs, “attacked” a Secret Service agent “unprovoked” in 2021, CNN reported. That incident “caused a breach of trust” between the Bidens and the Secret Service, according to the CNN report. Major was sent permanently back to Delaware in May 2021, shortly after the incident.
But that was only the beginning. In December 2021, the Bidens welcomed Commander to the White House.
That’s when the trouble began.
As of February 2024, Commander had bitten Secret Service personnel in at least 24 separate incidents, CNN reported. Commander reportedly bit seven people in a four-month stretch of 2023 alone. Biden reportedly witnessed several of Commander’s attacks himself, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The document also revealed that Secret Service agents would wish each other a “safe shift” before heading to work with Biden and the dog. Commander reportedly bit one agent so hard, he had to go to the hospital.
“The View” host Whoopi Goldberg attempted to laugh off Commander’s attacks in February, The Daily Wire reported. Goldberg joked that perhaps Commander was able to “see” something “that nobody else saw.”
But Commander is so violent, even liberal media outlets have begun to draw attention to the problem. Days after Goldberg’s comments, Slate published an article headlined “How Is Joe Biden’s Dog Not Dead Yet?”
“Aggressive dogs have been put down for far, far less,” the piece notes.
Aggressive dogs, yes. But also, as we now know, peaceful squirrels.