With the sad passing of Jane Goodall there has been a lot of discussion about her remarkable life and how it began with her discovery with the chimps when she so impressed her mentor with the observation that they used twigs to reach ants in deep hollow branches. His excited telegram about tool use made me think of beavers.
If beavers don’t use tools what exactly are they doing? Putting a piece of wood that you felled and chopped, mud you gathered or a stone you dragged across the landscape in exactly the right place to stop water so that eventually your home will be underwater seems pretty dam toolish to me.
And way more second order thinking than reaching into a rotted log for ants you want to eat right then or cracking a sea urchin open on a rock. In fact when beavers are killed and their teeth ripped out to be used by man those teeth are considered tools.
And when hundreds of animals cross over the dam or fish from the dam or lead their offspring over the dam, and when otters try to move into their cozy lodges to have their pups or a wood duck moves into a flooded trunk to make a nest in the cavity, there is an endless stream of other animals using what they have madee for their own purposes.
I would argue that beavers not only use tools but they MAKE them for other animals to use.
Call them the lending library of the animal kingdom.
