Furry muggers impose mob rule on New Yorkers
The first victim was a 2-year-old boy, who was finishing an oat and nut bar.
‘‘They had been stalking him the whole time,’’ his mother said in an internet missive to other worried parents. ‘‘We spent four hours in the ER tonight.’’
Another attack was reported six days later. Again, the victim was a toddler. Then a month and a half passed in which no further incidents were reported on the local mothers’ online message board.
Then another child was set upon. ‘‘She’s OK,’’ the girl’s mother wrote. ‘‘But please be careful with your children. Their little fingers look like peanuts to the squirrels.’’
The New York squirrel attacks all took place in Stuyvesant Town – an estate built in the 1940s to deal with a postwar housing shortage.
The planners envisioned a green haven with lawns and numerous trees. While 25,000 people occupied the tower blocks, the trees housed a colony of bold, urban squirrels. This year, the two worlds have collided.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of feeding them, the squirrels have developed a New York sensibility. One of them was filmed recently, carrying a slice of pizza across a playground and up a tree, with the pizza hanging over its shoulder like an orange cape.
It would be wrong to say that there is now war between the Manhattanites and the squirrels, but things are quite tense. One woman has taken to wearing slip-on shoes, which she hurls at the squirrels when they come too close.
‘‘They don’t run away from you,’’ a mother who used to work in finance said. ‘‘They will stand there in your way.’’
She added that it sometimes felt as if they were hunting.
She said she thought the problem was that some people were feeding and handling the squirrels.
One of these feeders is said to be Bernie Goetz, a New Yorker known since 1984 as the Subway Vigilante for shooting and wounding four men he believed were about to mug him on a train. He was in the news again last year, accused of keeping a squirrel in his Greenwich Village flat.
The mother, who did not want to give her name, said she had seen Goetz feeding squirrels. ‘‘He picked one up and put it in his pocket.’’
Asked about this by email, Goetz said he doubted the stories of squirrel attacks – and others concur.
In one of many letters on the subject to the local newspaper, Marietta Hawkes said she had lived in the area for 40 years. ‘‘I do not know of any child bitten,’’ she said.
The squirrel debate often seems to break down on generational lines: older residents against their new, affluent neighbours.
A few days ago, a young mother reported an argument about the squirrels with one of several ‘‘nice elderly ladies’’. The lady reached into her purse ‘‘and threw a handful of peanuts at my son’s feet!’’ she wrote on the online message board. ‘‘Immediately multiple squirrels swarmed him, so we got out of there fast.’’