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Squirrels, whales, bears: why is the road to the White House strewn with dead animals?

The death of Peanut, an Instagram-famous squirrel that was euthanized after being seized from his New York home last week, has become an unlikely election motivation for Republicans in just the latest of a string of bizarre animal-related incidents that have marked this presidential election campaign.

Outrage over Peanut’s death last week at the hands of New York wildlife officials has boiled over in conservative circles, with JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, saying that Donald Trump is “fired up” about the incident and that “Democrats murdered the Elon Musk of squirrels”.

He added at a North Carolina rally on Sunday: “The same government that doesn’t care about hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant criminals coming into our country, doesn’t want us to have pets.”

Musk himself, the billionaire backer of Trump, told the Joe Rogan podcast on Monday that the death of Peanut, killed alongside a raccoon named Fred, should “really get people out there mobilized. I hope people just go out there and vote, for Peanut, man, if nothing else. Just vote.” Musk mulled the issue at length with Rogan, another Trump supporter, and mused that “if they can do that to your pets, what do you think they can do to you?”

Peanut was taken from the home of Mark Longo in Pine City, New York, on Wednesday after allegedly biting the finger of a wildlife official inspecting how the animal had been kept in the seven years since Longo adopted him. It’s illegal to have a squirrel as a pet in New York and Peanut was euthanized, along with Fred, to test them for rabies, according to the New York state department of environmental conservation (DEC).

The uproar over Peanut, who had about 720,000 followers on Instagram, where he posed for pictures in an assortment of hats, has been such that the DEC allowed staff to work from home on Monday and Tuesday after its offices were subjected to at least 10 bomb threats. A GoFundMe for Peanut has already raised about $200,000 for the “P’nuts Freedom Farm, which tirelessly rescues and provides care for vulnerable animals”.

The incident, elevated from quirky state-based officialdom to a matter of national concern by Republicans as the US heads to the polls on Tuesday, rounds off a series of unusual animal-themed occurrences studding an electoral battle between Trump and Kamala Harris that has been wild in several ways.

During the only televised debate between Trump and Harris, in September, Trump repeated debunked allegations that Haitian migrants were eating the pets of people in Springfield, Ohio. “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said, prompting incredulity among debate moderators and Harris. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

The furore over the Springfield pets was sandwiched between two other, separate, dog-killing episodes. Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, revealed in a book that she shot her dog Cricket in a gravel pit, along with a “nasty and mean” goat and three horses. Then it emerged that Kevin Roberts, the man behind the controversial rightwing Project 2025 manifesto, admitted killing a neighbor’s pit bull with shovel around 2004.

Not to be outdone, Robert Kennedy Jr, who is set to be given sweeping powers on health and food policy should Trump win, revealed that doctors previously found a dead worm in his brain, that he stashed a dead bear in his car and smuggled it into New York’s Central Park to make it look like a cyclist killed it, and that he was under investigation for sawing the head off a beached whale and taking it home, strapped to the roof of his minivan.

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy, RFK Jr’s daughter, recalled in a 2012 interview about the incident, which occurred 20 years ago.

The repeated forays of fauna into the election campaign have “all been bizarre. I mean, Haitians eating cats, planting a dead bear in Central Park, Kristi Noem shooting a pet dog – it’s all unsettling and bizarre,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and a veteran animal rights campaigner.

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Americans care deeply about animals, especially their pets, Pacelle said, but these incidents haven’t been used to advance any animal welfare cause; instead, they used for other priorities such as Trump’s invective against immigrants.

“These are all strange one-offs rather than form a broader narrative that could be told about animal welfare,” he said.

“It’s a missed opportunity by politicians to connect to animal welfare issues which is a universal issue for all voters. We have a big problem with animals in our society – we have factory farming, trophy hunting, we have puppy mills, cock and dog fighting. These are big problems and there is the public will to do something about them. Instead, we have this.”

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage