New Hampshire
Want to own a pet squirrel or raccoon? Some NH lawmakers want to make it legal
Peanut the squirrel was euthanized, now his owner wants answers
Mark Longo’s pet squirrel, Peanut, and raccoon, Fred, were seized and euthanized by New York officials in October. Now he is looking for answers.
Last year, New York state authorities seized and euthanized an Instagram-famous squirrel named Peanut and a raccoon named Fred.
In New York, it’s illegal to keep animals like squirrels and raccoons as pets. So after receiving numerous complaints, the state Department of Environmental Conservation took the animals from owner Mark Longo and put them down.
The story prompted national outcry and, to prevent that situation from happening in New Hampshire, Rep. James Spillane, R-Deerfield, has introduced a bill to allow the ownership of some squirrels and raccoons in New Hampshire.
“I wanted to make sure that we don’t get a black eye in the state of New Hampshire with the same sort of bad press,” said Spillane at a hearing on Wednesday.
What would be the rules for owning raccoons or squirrels?
Spillane’s bill would allow rehabilitated raccoons and gray squirrels to be kept as pets without a permit if a wildlife rehabilitation facility makes a determination that the animal cannot survive in the wild and is “up to date” on any vaccines required.
The bill says that the animals cannot be confiscated or euthanized without permission from the owner. But if the animal does not meet the requirements, the fish and game commission may charge the owner with a fine, confiscate the animal for examination, and vaccinate them.
It would also allow people who come to New Hampshire from a state where having a pet raccoon or gray squirrel is legal to keep the animal.
However, the bill would not allow people to buy raccoons or squirrels at a pet store, breed them, or trap and capture them from the wild.
Downsides of a pet squirrel
Representatives from the Humane Society and New Hampshire Fish and Game Department both spoke against the bill, warning the House Environment and Agriculture committee of the dangers of keeping wildlife as pets.
“This bill threatens public health and safety and promotes the dangerous and inhumane trend of keeping wild animals as pets,” said Kurt Ehrenberg, the New Hampshire state director for the Humane Society. “Raccoons and squirrels are wild animals, not domesticated pets.”
They said that keeping raccoons and squirrels as pets come with risks like physical harm from unpredictable behavior and the spread of dangerous diseases like rabies.
Even though the bill calls for making sure the animals have their “required” vaccines, Dan Bergeron, the chief of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Wildlife division, said that there are no statutes that require vaccines for the animals and no approved vaccines for the animals because they aren’t proven to be effective.
Will New Hampshire allow pet squirrels and raccoons?
It’s unclear yet whether this bill will make headway in the legislature, but this isn’t the first time New Hampshire has attempted to legalize alternative pets.
Last year, one bill would’ve allowed Granite Staters to own small-tailed monkeys, raccoons, foxes, otters, skunks, and red tailed kangaroos without a permit.
However, the House voted against the legislation.
“These animals really are not appropriate for home pet ownership. They are essentially wild animals,” said Rep. Peter Bixby, D-Dover, at the committee hearing. “Opening ownership of these up to people who just want them because it’s a cool idea could end up having our shelters dealing with kangaroos and short tailed monkeys that people decide they can’t handle after a short while.”
According to Bergeron, squirrels and raccoons can only be kept currently in New Hampshire under an exhibitors permit, so somewhere such as Squam Lake Science Center. While licensed rehabilitation centers can rescue an injured animal and nurse them back to health, they are not allowed to keep the animals. If they cannot be released into the wild, they must be euthanized.
Do any states allow people to own squirrels and raccoons?
It’s illegal in most states to own a pet squirrel without a permit.
But a few states do allow it, such as Florida.
Soon after Joshua Bogden attempted to register to vote on the day of Portsmouth’s municipal elections Nov. 11, he faced a tough decision.
Bogden had not brought along a passport or birth certificate to prove his citizenship. And though he had previously been registered and voted in Wilton, poll workers told Bogden he needed to leave and return with one of those physical documents.
Bogden could either drive to city hall and request a same-day copy of his birth certificate, or rush home and find his own copy. But he had only hours until the polls closed, and only minutes before Portsmouth stopped its birth certificate service at 4:30.
In the end, Bogden decided to drive home and chance that he could find the certificate, he said during a press conference Thursday. He did find it and was able to vote. But the hassle he faced is at the center of arguments by some that recent changes to New Hampshire’s voter registration laws are too strict and will result in frustrated voters choosing not to vote.
“Luckily, I lived nearby,” he said. “But if there had been any more sort of traffic or anything in my personal life — going home to pick up the kids, trying to do this after work — there’s no way I would have been able to come back and vote successfully.”
Since a new law took effect November 2024, New Hampshire voters are required to produce hard copies of citizenship documents the first time they register to vote in the state. The law eliminated the previous option for voters registering on Election Day to sign a “qualified voter affidavit” that allowed them to vote without proving citizenship by testifying on penalty of perjury that they were a U.S. citizen.
Republican supporters of the law, House Bill 1569, say the new requirements are reasonable and necessary to close loopholes that could allow non-citizens to vote, and that voters should prepare by obtaining their citizenship documents in advance
Lawmakers also passed a follow-up law in 2025, House Bill 464, that allows local election officials to access the Statewide Voter Registration System, New Hampshire Vital Records, and Division of Motor Vehicle databases in order to attempt to corroborate a resident’s citizenship.
But a number of voting rights groups are suing in federal court to block the law, arguing it creates an unconstitutional burden and that it will disenfranchise eligible voters, especially those for whom obtaining a passport or birth certificate could be difficult.
In the meantime, the October and November municipal elections have offered a fresh look into how the new law might affect voting in practice.
According to a tally by the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights, 123 voters were turned away from the polls due to a lack of documents. Combined with the 121 residents the group reported were turned away for the same reason during town meetings in spring, at least 244 people were turned away in 2025, the group says.
Voting rights advocates and Democrats argue those tallies are a cautionary tale for the state ahead of the September 2026 state primaries and the November 2026 midterm federal election. Many more people are likely to vote in those elections, and many more who don’t bring along their citizenship documentation could be turned away, advocates warn.
They hope U.S. District Court Judge Samantha Elliott, who is presiding over the lawsuit, will issue an injunction ahead of the midterms. A full evidentiary trial in that case is expected in February.
At Thursday’s press conference, advocates attempted to show the difficulty posed by the new documentary requirements, which election law experts have called the strictest in the country.
In addition to Bogden, Brayden Rumsey, a Dover voter, said he had to drive home to retrieve his passport in order to vote Nov. 11. Rumsey was not aware of the new citizenship documentation requirements; he had assumed that showing a REAL ID driver’s license would suffice, since to obtain it he had been required to show his passport.
“I have my own car. I have my own way of getting there. I don’t have any kids to take care of. I have access to a passport and access to my birth certificate that I could easily get,” he said. “I know a lot of people don’t have that privilege like I do.”
And Michael Blanchette, who recently moved from Concord to Manchester, said he had called the city ahead of the Nov. 11 election to get confirmation of his citizenship using his previous registration and presence on the voter database. But despite that confirmation, Blanchette said he was still asked for citizenship documentation at the Manchester Ward 7 polls, and had to wait an hour for multiple election workers and city officials to clear him to vote.
“(I knew) if I went back home and took my pain meds, I was not coming back out,” he said. “And it was now or never. So I stuck through it. I didn’t realize it would just drag on.”
Linnea Hartsuyker, a supervisor of the checklist in Dover’s Ward 5, said she had seen at least one prospective voter leave and not return once learning of the requirements.
Hartsuyker said the 2025 law providing election workers access to the state voter file proved helpful, allowing her to verify at least those voters who had already registered. That remedy would not have worked for new voters who moved from out of state, she said.
“Last year at the general (election) I and my team registered 50 people per hour for 12 hours,” she said. “That’s almost one person per minute with the old system, and I am quite worried about being able to do that in the coming election, at the midterms.”
Access to those state databases might vary from polling place to polling place depending on internet availability and the amount of time and manpower available during a rush of voters, critics say. Rumsey and Blanchette said workers at their polling places did not appear to have direct access to those databases, necessitating calls to city hall officials.
It is not clear how the apparent tallies of voters turned away from voting might affect the trial in next year’s lawsuit.
In a July 29 ruling, Elliott ruled that some of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in 2024, lacked standing because their experiences did not directly demonstrate a potential unconstitutional barrier to voting. But she granted standing to other plaintiffs, such as the Coalition for Open Democracy, the League of Women Voters of New Hampshire, the Forward Foundation, and three plaintiffs who were minors but planned to register to vote when they turned 18 and said the need to procure documentation was a burden.
The Attorney General’s Office has defended the law and said the constitutional challenges are not substantiated. In a Nov. 7 memorandum asking Elliott to dismiss the case, Assistant Attorney General Michael DeGrandis argued that the law struck a balance between allowing every eligible person to vote and safeguarding the process from fraud.
“New Hampshire pairs that open access with commonsense eligibility checks so only the votes of eligible voters are counted,” DeGrandis wrote. “Striking this balance is essential to guarantee an election system that is both welcoming and vigilant in protecting the integrity of the ballot.”
And he wrote that the law does not impede the organizations suing, and that the individual plaintiffs “have not offered competent evidence of cognizable injuries.”
“It is Plaintiffs’ burden to come forward with definite, competent evidence of injury, causation, and redressability, but they have not,” DeGrandis wrote.
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