Except in this case it was a splinter in her leg that killed Erica the beaver while she languished alone in captivity after her free life on the River Tay. The splinter got infected which caused septic shock that killed her rapidly – I read somewhere that it usually takes about six hours, and the papers are happily reporting this as proof that Erica didn’t die of the stress from being captured, taken away from her family and kept alone in a cage.
They claimed that, if stress was found to be an issue, it would highlight the “cruel policy” of trapping beavers. However the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS), who had been caring for the animal, revealed that Erica’s death was due to nothing more than a small splinter in her leg.
Nothing more than a splinter in her leg! A splinter in her leg??? Considering this was a BEAVER we’re talking about, I find that to be an astonishing sentence. For a beaver, who chews wood, swallows wood, builds with wood, sleeps in wood and is born in wood, to get a splinter must be a fairly commonplace occurrence. Daily, I assume.
How often do those splinters end in death?
What are the effects of severe deprivation and traumatic loss on the immune system of an animal as social as the beaver? I assume every biologist and reporter would want an answer to that question. I went checking about and found this lovely article from the BBC
Social stress can trigger potentially deadly over-activity by the immune system, scientists have found. They found that stressful social interactions stimulated a dangerous inflammatory response in the mice equivalent to the human condition septic shock.
Well, well, well. That’s very interesting and makes total sense considering we humans know that a terrifying life makes us weaker. I wonder why no one mentioned this finding in discussing Erica’s splinter? It must be an oversight. Hmm. Would it be worse to think they were intentionally misleading the media? Or that they were simply unaware of relevant research?
I’ll take my answer off the air.
