Agricultural Digest – County Highway

When Animals Attack

Squirrels, Rise Up!

It takes a worried squirrel to make liberals go nuts

They have nothing to lose but their Elodonts

By Walter Kirn

The squirrel is a lonesome, worried, restless creature. It lives on its own, without allies, without protectors. It has its teeth and claws. It has its acorns. It hoards its acorns, as many as it can gather, because, for a squirrel, the future is uncertain, and it knows not to count on help, including human help, should times get hard. Occasionally, though, human beings do take squirrels as pets, easing the lot of these most anxious animals, with fascinating but complicated results. America should hardly need reminding that it has been just over a year since P’Nut, the most famous pet squirrel in history with 500,000 followers on Instagram, suffered an unjust, untimely death at the hands of New York State wildlife officials who’d ripped him from the happy home provided for him by Mark Longo, his fellow influencer. Having learned to rely on Longo for necessities, P’Nut went on to entertain the world with his acrobatic talents and his antic ways. Merrily leaping from armchair to TV …

Departments

America by the Numbers

By The Editors

250 — Estimated cost of the California wildfires over the past year (in billions) 12 — Insurance payouts related to California wildfires over the past year (in billions) 5 — People who watched Tucker Carlson’s cordial interview with Nick Fuentes (in millions) 11.1 — Tons of Qatari urea being imported into the US by the Koch brothers over the next 15 years (in millions) 62 — Global happiness ranking of Americans under 30 (below Moldova, Bosnia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Cyprus, and the Dominican Republic, and barely above Malaysia) 53 — Increase since 2003 in the percentage of Americans who report having eaten all of their meals alone the previous day 43 — Percentage decline in cases of peanut allergies after US health guidance was reversed, to encourage parents to expose young children to peanuts 27.3 — Millions of Americans who watched Game 7 of the World Series 1 — New rock albums that made it onto the Billboard Top 200 list for 2024 150 — People of Somali descent living in …