You know what they say, Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. And three times is a trend.
This year has the mysterious fortune of beginning on a grisly note where beaver carcasses are being featured on the front page from Alberta to Idaho. If 2012 was the year of the rabid beaver, 2013 seems to be the year of the mangled beaver. Hopefully this is a fad that has had its 15 minutes, but we may see more of this before the year is through.
The day I nailed a frozen beaver carcass to a tree
It started last month with the Calgary Herald’s article about nailing frozen beaver to a tree in the hopes of attracting the elusive wolverine. I remarked at the time that what if Wolverines were attracted to puppies? Would they still run a photo of a skinned one nailed to a tree on the front page?
Mirjam hammered two large nails into the [beaver] carcass, tied a string around it to haul it up the tree and climbed up the tree to start pounding it in place. Then she jumped down, handed the hammer to me and asked me to finish the task.
So that’s how I came to nail a frozen, skinned beaver to a tree. Ah, the glamorous life of a journalist.
A few weeks later a story ran about a traumatized cycler in British Columbia who had ridden upon a dead beaver whose tail had been cut off. Mind you, there are plenty of places in the world where they pay a bounty for beaver tails, so maybe it was an act of free enterprise. Because all news must be reported a photo of that beaver also ran on the front page.
BEAVER BUTCHERED
Bonita Carey and Megan Keene were riding their bikes on Errington Road Friday afternoon when they saw a sight that changed the tone of their whole day.
In the ditch at the side of the road lay a dead, mature beaver — with its tail hacked off.
The pair were horrified by what they saw.
“This is absolutely sickening, Carey said. “The fact that they butchered its tail off just makes me cringe. It’s atrocious. What if a family rode by?”
Or what if someone opened their newspaper? Maybe you can explain to me why if something is too horrible for people to see they would put it in the paper so that more people could be horrified by it?
And now a third story is reported from Idaho where a skinned beaver is being used again as Lynx bait.
Volunteers help in study of NW reclusive critters
Lynx have been documented as residents of the Purcells. Researchers can confirm individuals returning to an area through the year by fur markings captured in the photos and DNA snagged by brass gun-cleaning brushes fixed to the trees below the beaver bait.
An Oregon trapper provides the neatly skinned and cut beaver carcasses as a byproduct of his legal trapping operation, Lucid said. “We get a few at a time and stockpile
One has to feel that this wave of species insensitivity is tricking down from the northern climes like snowmelt and will reach California any minute. I recognize that reporting on this trend will leave folks asking why I would show such upsetting things on a beloved beaver website, but I realize that in all the world, in all the animal rights groups, and in all the assembled earth defenders, this is the only place that will notice that there have been three beaver carcass stories in the past 30 days. If we don’t notice, who will?
The last story is slightly less awful, and the photo less grisly, but why on earth don’t these articles run photos like this instead?
