Before the beavers came to Martinez I didn’t much think about trapping or trappers. I never chained myself to a fur store or threw paint on a stole in protest. I probably thought more about the mistreatment of lab rats and rhesus monkeys (and some particularly unlucky Scotty dogs) in grad school, but I never really paid that much attention to the issue.

Of course that changed post-beaver. For years now I have reviewed articles that are both wistful and admiring about the “lowly” trapper. There seems to be an allure of the lost mountain men and a sense that killing beavers or foxes is as much apart of America’s heritage as a re-enactment of a particular battle in the Civil War, which may be true.  There are trappers who become beaver experts and start advocating for them, like Grey Owl and Connecticut’s Skip Hilliker, and trappers who just  think they’re beaver experts and spend their time spreading lies about them, like the charmer in MA, or the one in PA who said he was only killing the ‘soldier beavers‘.

I try not to react from an emotional place, and to stay focused on the fact that trappers are real people who need to earn a living and  ultimately they may become the people who install the flow devices as public opinion shifts.   Still, every now and then a trapping image or pronouncement is so stunningly  horrific to me it catches me totally off guard. Yesterday, for example, a trapper that gets no link contacted me and said he’d invented a new form of live trap and was I interested. His youtube channel showed a battlefield of beavers, and I thought really? I suggested he talk to Sherri Tippie and he wrote back that he had but that she was very unreasonable. This morning she wrote an animated response describing his trapping devotions and putting voice to my private misgivings.

Sometimes seeing these grisly images can be like a black and white photo from the holocaust, which I even hesitate to type because it implies that I think the actions are morally equivalent or their impact is the same – which I don’t. But it can be throat-closingly, indescribably, shocking – especially when I don’t expect it. Somehow I think the very existence of that shock is offensive to some people, so that they deliberately mock it or provoke it like a young boy on the playground chasing his screaming classmate with the a dead lizard. Remember Josh’s aunt? And her remark that PETA members made excellent coats?

For the record, I don’t think we should set fires to fur warehouses or butcher stores and I also don’t think we should rely reflexively on killing to solve problems.  I’ve noted before that the way we treat animals has become a kind of “false populism” where we identify which ‘tribe’ we belong to by whether or not we kill the intruder or discourage it. But this kind of tribal identification is essentially false -because we personally know there are all kinds of hunters with compassion and plenty of PETA-types without it. People are more complicated than tribes and our attitudes towards wildlife are a reflection of that complication and evolving all the time based on whether we believe we have realistic options or not.

So this week’s AP article on the pros and cons of trapping is valiant nondiscussion of the issues: you know the type – some say the earth is round, some flat, what do you think? It describes what some trappers say and describes what some members of the animal saving group Born Free says and never discusses once the issue of wildlife management in a realistic way or whether we have other tools than extermination in our arsenal. It prompted some fiery push back from the trappers in PA which prompted one of my favorite outdoor writers to reiterate his support for trapping, which prompted me to write him in frustration saying  something about everything looking like nails to men with only hammers…

Which brings us to the review in Fur Taker Magazine Sept 2011, (and no, I’m not kidding). It’s actually a positive recommendation of Mike Callahan’s Beaver solutions DVD by trapper Stephen Vantassel, which only makes sense only if we admit we’re living in a post-tribal world.

I have been a long fan of beaver pipes or beaver flow devices ever since I became convinced of their effectiveness in the late 1990s. Unfortunately a lot of people within the wildlife damage management community, including fur trappers, see these devices as threats to their way of life. I would argue that there is no necessary reason to think this way. I suggest it is better to view the pipes as just another tool in the toolbox for doing wildlife management.

Good for you, Stephen. He of course goes on to mention crazy animal rights people just so readers know he’s STILL ONE OF THE TRIBE but its hard work crossing the aisle these days so I thank you for it. In the meantime, take a lesson from the world of beavers and talk reasonably to someone who’s not in your tribe today.

LOCAL UPDATE:

Remember  the big storm back in March that wiped out the lodge and blew away the filter on Skip’s flow device? Well Moses brought it back and its been sitting in the corp yard. We’ve been watching to see when the pipe would be plugged (the filter stops the beavers from feeling the suction and plugging the pipe) and I figured since it didn’t happen all summer with  it would probably happen after the first rain. Which it did. I took this photo yesterday morning with no movement coming out of the pipe. So it has to be fixed because the dam will rise and is rising. Dave Scola says that city staff will be replacing the filter themselves any day now. So let me know if you see anything.The good news is that its winter so whatever happens the beavers will get the water back.