Did you ever have a dream college? Where, if you were blessed with millions more dollars and thirty more IQ points and an SAT score you couldn’t see thru if you held it up to the light, you would have pursued a dream education as a dream co-ed under dream professors doing dream research? Maybe it was Notre Dame or Oxford or MIT, or maybe you were lucky enough to live the dream (or escape it entirely). But mine was always Wellesley College in Massachusetts. A Liberal Arts school for women started in 1870. Hilary Clinton went there, and so did Madeleine Albright and Diane Sawyer. The motto of Wellesley is “Non Ministrari sed Ministrare” (Not to be ministered unto, but to minister). Apparently they are especially happy to minister unto beavers, which if I had gone to my dream college I would probably be more able to translate.
So you can imagine how I felt when Cheryl sent me this this.
Wellesley beavers killed off
By bbrown | Published: December 31, 2011
Pretty wild story in the Wellesley Local Town Pages (you have to kind of scroll around to locate the story) about the Wellesley Health Department, DPW and Natural Resources Commission joining forces with a business to kill off some beavers whose dam or dams caused flooding in neighborhoods near the Wellesley Recycling & Disposal Facility.
Beavers causing problems for a low-lying town! That almost never always happens. So a business or two complains to Public Works, and they take it up with the Conservation Commission because you need permission to kill beavers in MA. It’s not an emergency, and the commission determines there’s no threat to people or property, YET, but they decide to wait a few months and then call in an expert. Hopefully, they assume, it will be too late to fix in December. Now this famous college town is not completely blind to its position and following in the world and has the presence of mind to bring in someone that would offer other solutions than just trapping – maybe think about installing a flow device to control the problem humanely and keep the vegans happy.
Remember, this is MA so you can guess who they called. He dutifully examined the problem ten days before Christmas and advised the powers that be that the odds of fixing it humanely weren’t stellar. They could try an installation but the wetlands were very shallow, no pond could be tolerated and the beavers might just rebuild somewhere else. I was curious why the commission meeting minutes reported going to the Health Department, (which means permission to trap any way possible) before they brought in Mike. He says that although the article says Beaver Solutions did the trapping, that isn’t true. He gave them his feedback but didn’t know until he read the article that they hired someone else for that step.
My guess is the tossed the name “Solutions” around to make them sound slightly more humane than they were feeling. Fortunately the Executive Director of the town’s Natural Resources Conservation Commission said some astonishingly distracting things to the media to justify her decision.
Why do people say stupid things like “in my 14 years with the town this is the first instance of beavers causing a problem”? They just provoke me to start the new year with a morning’s research on the Google tempting me into using a compass pencil to identify all towns with beaver conflicts in the last 14 years within a 10 mile radius of Ms. Bowser’s front door. (How’s that for a name, btw?) You know, towns like Needham, Wayland and Natick, to name a few. I’m a busy woman, I don’t have time to waste wondering how it is that the town could have a “Beaver Street”, “Beaver Creek” and “Beaver Meadows” without any history of EVER having a problem with beavers?
Don’t tell me that there aren’t 100 strong and compassionate young women on the campus willing to steward the wetlands if the flow device failed. Or a host of environmental science instructors that could lead their class into learning how to install another while studying all the wildlife that appears because of the beaver dams. Don’t tell me there aren’t enough bleeding heart’s in those ivory halls to keep the beavers from flooding or eating begonias by painstakingly unclogging the drains or filters or pipes or whatever it takes. This is Wellesley for Chrissake!
It heartened me that that on my morning of research I found (count them) 63 references to this story in everything from real estate listings to local blogs. At least it will get attention. If I didn’t know better I’d assume that this is the grand lesson they teach at Wellesley.
Always do the right thing. Unless it’s hard.
