So this week I attended a zoom presentation on beavers and wetlands for the Center for Watershed Protection Network because Bob Boucher and Scott McGill were giving presentations on beavers and stream restoration and they both did very well talking about how much beavers matter to water storage and biodiversity and fire prevention and slowing floods. There was a good crowd gathered but you could tell that there were many in the audience that were like, wait, beavers?
Are you sure?
The host began the talk by saying that his son had beavers on his land in North Carolina and when he went to visit he could watch them slapping their tails angrily and realized “you really don’t want to hang around during breeding season”.
Which stayed on my mind all week. What exactly was he assuming? That beavers are like tule elk and all the males compete for the beaver harem with huge fights that leave young beavers bloodied and make the strongest beaver dominant? I mean clearly he has zero idea about the way beavers actually mate. With a partner. That they live with and raise kits with year after year.
Avert your eyes if you can’t handle the violence in this photo of actual beavers actually mating filmed in Martinez by Moses Silva,
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Later there were questions after the presentation. Like what about all the mosquitoes that beavers cause?and what about the flow devices that fail? And do fishermen complain when they get trapped by those big dams? And how can you keep the population from getting too large and winding up with hundreds of beavers?
And I realized that these questions are exactly the same ones people ask over and over and over again. Like they are reading from a script. The beaver nonbeliever script. The same script our city council read from on November 7 2007 the night of the big meeting. And it’s kind of like arguing with an anti-vaxxer about covid. It really doesn’t matter what you say. Their mind is firmly made up. They are only talking to find reasons to justify their conviction and no matter what you tell them they will keep believing as the do.
And I thought of Mark Twain. People really want to trust their judgments. No matter what.
