Primghar Iowa is in the upper left hand corner of the state – almost touching Minnesota. A small county seat of less than 1000 people it’s primary claim to fame is its most famous resident Joseph Welch the head counsel for the United States Army, who asked Joseph McCarthy, incredulously what we no longer bother to say in the current administration “Have you no decency, sir?”.
Well apparently they’re not content with simply being first to pick the president anymore. Now they want to kill all the beavers. In fact they want to kill 90% more beaver than they actually have.
I’m not kidding.
O’Brien County establishes beaver bounty
PRIMGHAR—O’Brien County is leaving it to beaver trappers to take care of cutting down the large furry rodent’s numbers.
On Tuesday, Dec. 10, in Primghar, the board of supervisors established a new countywide beaver bounty policy effective with the beginning of beaver trapping season through one week after the end of the season.
“The price doesn’t change based on the age of the beaver,” said board chair Sherri Bootsma. “They’re going to have to indicate where the beaver was harvested,” Bootsma said. “It is kind of an honor system, but they do have to map out where it came from.
A bounty of $35 will be paid per beaver until a maximum of $5,000 from the county’s rural services fund for the season has been paid out.
Just so you understand what we’re dealing with here, at 25 dollars a head -er a tail- pays for 142 beavers to be slain. Iowa has been subject to plenty of flooding and I suppose those dislocated beavers could be swimming about trying to find a home, but when I check wikipedia it tells me that the entire county has .2 square miles of water to its name. That’s about three football fields of water if they’re lucky. And there is zero fucking chance of finding 142 beavers in 3 football fields.
So basically what they’re done is create a dead beaver import business. Good luck with that.
“The theory is, it’ll start a decrease in their population,” said supervisor Dan Friedrichsen. “Then they get harder to trap and their population is where maybe it needs to be.”
He noted he does not want to see the county’s beaver population totally wiped out.
“If it’s a lake, they deserve to be there; they should be there,” Friedrichsen said. “Certain systems — they need to be there.”
“We have a pond that has a family of beavers there,” Friedrichsen said. “We like to take two a year out of that family, and then that keeps the damage low. It keeps them from spreading.”
That’s pretty charitable if you, sir. Only killing off a few family members every year. Pretty dam charitable. Bless his heart,
Apparently you have to bring in the WHOLE beaver with tail attached because they don’t want to shell out money for someone who just goes to a fur dealer and buys up a bunch of tails. You know?
