“People get upset about that, but that’s why we call them aquatic rodents,” he said. “We want to stress that they are rodents … not furry, cuddly teddy bears.”
Thank you Greg Hall, the street superintendent of Norman OK, for putting a long-suspected trade secret into language everyone understands. We should all respect your authority and pay attention. Officials call beavers “rodents’ when they want to discourage any opposition to killing them. Officials say beavers ‘breed like rodents” when they want to justify the need for killing them.
Officials are hoping that instead of seeing this:
You think about this:
- Big Black Rat – Anonymous
So they can do this:
- USDA Self-Adminstration
“People think beavers are cute and cuddly, from what they’ve seen on TV, but they can cause real problems in an urban area like Norman,” Hall said. Beavers, who build dams to store food and raise their families, are also destructive and can lay waste to a fully grown tree overnight.
“You can go to sleep one night and the tree’s fine and then wake up the next morning and it’s gone,” Hall said. “They work quick and they can do a lot of damage.”
What a relief to know that when we read the word rodent it doesn’t apply to the literal meaning – you know the fact that their teeth keep growing their entire lives (Latin Rōdentia- meaning “gnawer”). Wikipedia tells me that rodents in general make up 40% of all mammals and appeared shortly after the last winged dinosaur around 65 million years ago. It is true that MOST rodents breed quickly and are important to the ecosystem by being a good food source and spreading seeds around before they die. Beavers are unusual rodents in that it takes a long time for them to breed and, like porpcupines, (another atypical rodent) they are only in estrus for a few hours a year.
But as Greg helpfully illustrates, calling them rodents has nothing to do with anything except to explain the big red target on their backs. Of course we can’t expect Oklahoma to wrap trees or manage beavers in a more solution focused way through the use of flow devices, even through the Skunk Whisperer is nearby in Tulsa and can’t wait to install one. We certainly can’t expect Oklahoma to use fewer federal services from the USDA when statistics for 2009 show it is one of the highest users in the country (I guess the tea party might hate taxes but it loves them some uncle sam beaver-killin’). We obviously can’t expect Oklahoma to think of the droughts it faces each year or the trout or wood duck it wants to harvest down the road.
We can just be grateful for Greg telling it like it is.
“We want to stress that they are rodents … not furry, cuddly teddy bears.”
(Just a thought, but I’m pretty sure Greg would have something to say about bears too.)
