Who’s stealing photos now?

INTERNATIONAL COURT, COPYRIGHT LAW, AND BEAVERS

You may recall that there are two sets of beavers in Scotland. One ‘official trial’ in Knapdale in a landmass they can basically never escape, and one “unofficial” in the Tayside where our friends the Ramsays live. And after much hemming and hawing they were both granted permission to stay in the country. But there was a catch. They could only stay if there could be a legal permitted way to kill them when they caused issues for farmers. Scottish National Heritage was put in charge of the process.

There has been a massive scandal in recent days as a hardworking reporter from the Ferret, Rob Edwards obtained a copy of the training slides Scottish National Heritage used to educate the chosen few. The slideshow so horrified thousands of countrymen that there have been more than 15000 signatures to a petition to stop the killing. Remember Scotland is a small country. They haven’t ever had that many people sign anything.

This is from the final slide and partially explains the alarm.

It took all my breath when I first saw it. Not because of the dead beaver, lord knows we’ve seen enough of them over the years. But because of the joyful children in juxtaposition. Obviously having a fun day out with Dad. Killing funny things with flat tails,

And when you’re a child and your dad is a racist or a trapper or a terrorist, you don’t know any better. How could you? When I was a child and my father used to spray chemicals into the elm tree to avert dutch elm disease. I didn’t know any better. I would sit on the stairs and collect all the dying caterpillars that dropped out in a little container with leaves, hoping to keep them as pets. Every year I was surprised that they stopped moving within hours. And I didn’t understand until much later that my father spraying chemicals had killed them.

So I went though the slide show grimly reading how to kill beavers by catching them where they lived or worked and getting entire family groups. I downloaded it for your education if your stomach is strong enough But it was the third slide that REALLY got my attention. Maybe you’ll see why.

If that picture in the lower right corner looks familiar it should. Because its the photo of one Cheryl Reynolds taken of our kit and dad beaver in 2013 in Martinez California.

Our beavers used to teach snipers how to shoot family groups.

Of course I was beyond incensed. I contacted the reporter who said that the slideshow was prepared by the Scottish government and that he would find out how they got our photo. In the meantime he was willing to mark it as stolen on their website where I found it. Even though for him it was the middle of the night.

I believe this entire slideshow and decision to train authorized beaver killers was, what we candidly would call in America, a royal clusterfuck. The idea that some perky intern sat down on their laptop and made a power point about how to kill every last beaver (don’t forget the little ones) is beyond horrific. And the idea that they would browse the internet(s) like looters and choose photos from OUR WEBSITE where we teach how to NOT kill beavers is outrageous.

I wrote the board of the Scottish Natural Heritage as much and will let you know if I or the reporter hear back. If they wanted to do this right they could have used any of the thinly respectable trappers organization or even the USDA. Obviously they didn’t take this job seriously or they would have been more careful in how it was presented and not finished with a photo of two little girls having a dead beaver tea party

Stay tuned. I think there will be more to this story.

THE NATURE OF STEWARDSHIP

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Creative Solutions, Who's stealing photos now? December 11, 2019

The creator of the wonderful image is Catrin Welz-Stein of Germany who is an alarmingly talented graphic artist that creates digital collages. Doesn’t it make you want to look at things more closely? Good. I added Amelia’s awesome hobo-beaver and the headline because I wanted to use the image in our activity for the festival. It seemed like destiny that the beavers kit-sack matches she-sherlocks cl0ak. Isn’t that just a marriage made in heaven?

Destiny also released this study in time for my grant writing. How unbelievably lucky am I that this meta-analysis came out with exactly the right results?

Nature May Boost Learning Via Direct Effects on Learners

Kuo M, Barnes M and Jordan C (2019) Do Experiences With Nature Promote Learning? Converging Evidence of a Cause-and-Effect Relationship. Front. Psychol. 10:305. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00305

What emerged from this critical review was a coherent narrative: experiences with nature do promote children’s academic learning and seem to promote children’s development as persons and as environmental stewards – and at least eight distinct pathways plausibly contribute to these outcomes. Below, we discuss the evidence for each of the eight pathways and then the evidence tying nature to learning, personal development, and the development of stewardship.

This entire study was so wonderful you should really go read the whole thing. Very well laid out and a summary of the 8 learning paths that change in contact with nature. A paragraph on cause and effect towards the end had me in tears. I swear.

And second, spending time in nature appears to grow environmental stewards. Adults who care strongly for nature commonly attribute their caring to time, and particularly play, in nature as children – and a diverse body of studies backs them up (for review, see Chawla and Derr, 2012). Interestingly, the key ingredient in childhood nature experiences that leads to adult stewardship behavior does not seem to be conservation knowledge (knowledge of how and why to conserve). Although knowledge of how and why to conserve, which could presumably be taught in a classroom setting, has typically been assumed to drive stewardship behavior, it is relatively unimportant in predicting conservation behavior (Otto and Pensini, 2017). By contrast, an emotional connection to nature, which may be more difficult to acquire in a classroom, is a powerful predictor of children’s conservation behavior, explaining 69% of the variance (Otto and Pensini, 2017). Indeed, environmental attitudes may foster the acquisition of environmental knowledge (Fremery and Bogner, 2014) rather than vice versa. As spending time in nature fosters an emotional connection to nature and, in turn, conservation attitudes and behavior, direct contact with nature may be the most effective way to grow environmental stewards (Lekies et al., 2015).

Read that again, will you? Contact with nature drives learning about nature which in turn fosters stewardship. It isn’t lectures about biology, but outdoor positive experiences – like beaver festivals and watching beavers themselves, for example – that drive children to later care for the environment.

We care about what we know. Not ‘know’ like books. But ‘know’ as in play in, discover in, spend joyful time in – breathe in.

Petty Theft Trophy Hunters

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Who's stealing photos now? January 28, 2016

If this photo looks familiar – it should. It appears in the charmingly titled article “What you can shoot, and when you can shoot it” by Maine sportsmen, George Smith. In 2010 he stepped down after 18 years as executive director of the Sportsman Alliance in Maine. And now writes this beloved column for the Bangor Daily News. Apparently, he never had enough time trapping beavers to take his own dam photos. And the paper thought he should just borrow ours without asking.

**Martinez Beaver Kit 2008:Cheryl Reynolds**

This was taken on June 22, 2008, of our second batch of beaver kits. Funny thing is, it also happens to be the kit Mario chose to paint on his downtown mural that was ordered to be removed. Remember those fun days? And he’s also chosen to add it to the lower left corner of the mural we’re currently trying to get approved. Popular beaver kit that. No wonder the paper snagged it.

little I’m sure a charitable person would point out that Mr. Smith probably didn’t go hunting down that trophy photo himself – it was likely inserted by a copy editor or some intern. But we are certain Mr. Smith looked at his own article to see how it read, or shared it with a friend. He must have seen the photo and seen it was unattributed.