Have you read anything of the recent flurry of beaver drama from our nearby Vacaville neighbors? Apparently their city staff routinely recommends extermination as fix for beaver-human conflicts. We even heard a rumor that Martinez staff consulted with Vacaville way back when and was advised to “just kill them.” Is this the story that Carolyn Jones of the Chronicle will be following? Rather than assuming beavers are “increasing”, it may be useful to determine how routinely they’ve been killed for the past 50 years. Is there even a form that had to be filled out to document the extermination? Was their any record of the execution at all?
Humans routinely attempt to exterminate animals they consider to be pests. In most cases, animals can adapt some sort of survival techniques. Smart mice walk around the traps and smart coyotes never approach them. Beavers are different. They are entirely predictable. They do roughly the same thing in about the same place at nearly the same time every day of their furry lives. They display their home and office clearly. There is no part of their existence which does not make a perfect target.
It’s difficult, then, to understand the sense of gleeful accomplishment that some claim for trapping beavers. It is nothing like hunting. It’s never the result of a skillful undercover stakeout: You don’t have to wait for hours in the cold behind a duck blind. It’s as simple as the horrific advice I read on a sport site recommending that you “blow up the dam” and then wait with your shotgun for the beavers to come and fix it.
Beaver behavior is entirely predictable.
It would be safer for them if they were more erratic — if they were more like us. If they started to try things and then gave up on them, forgot what they were working on, let commitments slide, or suddenly abandon their children and partners to seek greener pastures somewhere else. They would be safer if they cared less about their families and their homes. Their loyalty makes them easy marks.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s the sense of gleeful accomplishment that comes with killing beavers: a feeling of having escaped the hearth and plow, of successfully keeping a bit on the side, of dodging the chains of family life. Maybe when men kill beavers (and it’s usually men) they are claiming victory over the pressures that seek to make them domesticated and predictable. Maybe it’s the last gasp of a weakened independence, struggling to reassert itself like a flailing turtle on its back.
Maybe we should assume the decision to exterminate beavers is a sign that whoever is making that decision is deeply uncertain of his position and power in the world and needs the imagined victory to be reminded of it.
Maybe real men don’t kill beavers.
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=wKdJ7cvCEGU]
