Someone appears to be painting squirrels in East Hartford, and animal control is on the case.
“We’ve gotten a report about two squirrels that appear to have been painted,” the Connecticut town’s Animal Control Division said in a Facebook post Monday alongside photos of two squirrels, one red and one blue.
“They appear to be OK, but we are looking to identify who is responsible for this,” the agency said, asking the public to contact the office with any information.
A deluge of comments followed as the mini-mystery got some residents up in arms about animal cruelty, while setting others’ imaginations afire. People bemoaned the advent of squirrels into politics, speculated on a gender-reveal motive, and predicted a squirrel-raccoon smackdown while pondering gang affiliations.
Someone else was confounded over “how somebody got close enough to paint a squirrel,” while others said the coloring looked self-inflicted, either from tumbling into a can of paint, stumbling into a pile of colored chalk in someone’s shed, or being drenched in marked-money ink after robbing a bank.
“What has the world come to?” the commenter who theorized “Gang Tainting” asked rhetorically. “People are a mess.”
“These squirrels messed around and found out!” someone else crowed.
The squirrelly couple were just a few colors short of a full set of Power Rangers, one person noted, while another pronounced them Pokémon characters.
Then there were the science experiment theorists: “Trap them, paint them, relocate them, and see if they come back.”
And of course there was the patriotic theme — where was the white one?
This is not the first case of squirrel painting ever recorded. In January 2024, a 62-year-old upstate New York man was arrested for spray-painting squirrels blazing red. The Patterson man told Putnam County animal control officials he had trapped them, painted them and let them go in a town park to see which ones returned to agitate his dogs.
