Squirrels are scarce in literature, but the few appearances they have made are telling. Herman Melville identified the flying squirrel as the fiction writer’s model for a realistic character: The creature is exactly as weird and incongruous as an actual person. One of Kafka’s most unsung creatures was a squirrel whose “bushy tail was famous in all the forests,” and whom he describes, in a jot in his notebooks, as “always traveling, always searching.” However, “it couldn’t talk about this, not because it lacked the power of speech but because it had absolutely no time.”

Our respect for squirrels as fellow commuters is all the more extraordinary when we consider that they belong to the hated Rodentia order. But squirrels’ stylish outerwear and good manners make them kindred city folk — so much so that we pay them the ultimate urban compliment: We totally ignore them.

Yes, there’s tension. The squirrel is not man’s best friend, but more like an honored frenemy. Squirrels are probably a bit too similar to us for comfort: They are workaholics, road-ragers and inadequate dads. They can be territorial and unkind to outsiders. They have been known to help themselves to the fruits of private gardens. I know this from experience. When I was young and Orthodox, a squirrel absconded with my yarmulke, which I had taken off my head while playing basketball. I tracked her to the woods, to her home tree, and I watched her clamber up to the snug opening of her den, a gap between the branches, through which she gleefully — or so it seemed to me — disappeared, along with my former yarmulke.

Squirrel panic is not unknown in our country. According to an anti-squirrel website, John C. Inglis, former deputy director of the N.S.A., supposedly said, “Frankly, the No. 1 threat experienced to date by the U.S. electrical grid is squirrels.” Of course the counterargument is so ethically unambiguous it’s no wonder an N.S.A. officer would miss it. The problem, as always, is our own rapacious overuse of energy, our own monstrous overbuilding of infrastructure, not the few squirrels who are the ensnared victims of it.