Feisty runaway beaver ‘is no Britney Spears’, says bemused owner
I’m not even going to speculate why this is a headline in a respectable newspaper.
England has been abuzz since Sunday with the news of a ‘rescued’ beaver from the Devon area who was supposedly found in a slurry pitt on a farm. Since England doesn’t HAVE beavers it is assumed that it is one of three who escaped from an estate when the electric fence failed.
If the name of the fella in the picture looks familiar, it should. Derek Gow is the author of the lovely article ten days ago about the value of beavers in the ecosystem. If you’re like me you will be interested to learn that a ‘slurry pit’ is a circular pitt where farmers dump animal waste and unusable bits to compost and turn into fertilizer eventually.
Apparently beavers aren’t happy about being fertilizer.
‘He’s about the size of a medium dog and he has been growling at us,’ said the park’s operations manager George Hyde.
All the accounts have been boasting about the VERY BRAVE female RSPCA officer who rescued him with a dog crate. Good for her, and good for the beaver! But I would venture to say that it wasn’t so much that she is remarkably courageous (although she may well be) as it is that the men on the case are big ol’ sissies.
(Unless they all have wooden legs I believe Sigmund Freud might have something to say about a grown man terrified of a growling beaver.)
Igor’s owner, Derek Gow of Lifton, Devon, said it would be impossible to confirm the beaver was his. ‘Beavers are a brown amorphous mess. They’re not Britney Spears,’ he said.
You know, another courageous female, Hope Ryden, recognized her individual beavers in Lily Pond. And we could recognize Mom, Dad, GQ and Reed. “Amorphous Mess?” Really? It’s possible that even though you wrote a very nice beaver article, you suffer from a rare condition known as Prosopoagnosia Castorium.
Just saying.
Here’s some more messiness from a wildlife center in Kentucky that was posted by our friends at the River Otter Ecology Project yesterday.
