Chronic beaver fever in Red Deer’s off-leash Three Mile Bend Park: previously it was controversy over dogs caught in beaver snares and traps; currently it is beavers injuring dogs, even killing one.
There are multitudes of wildlife hazards to canines in the area: porcupines, skunks, coyotes, deer, moose, even occasional bears and cougars. Back when I ran my dogs down there, they wore electronic “hearing aids” to burn them out on chasing wildlife.
But the worst hazards were the junkyard owners and their unruly, vicious curs. I carried a stout, pointed wading staff against the attack dogs and showed my pepper spray to any owners who objected violently.
There is considerable surprise being expressed that our national rodent would do anything as un-Canadian as resort to violence, even when being attacked. People have not been paying attention.
In recent years there have been many reports of violent, behaviour by unusual suspects: groundhogs, squirrels, owls, even supposedly phlegmatic porcupines. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that 27,000 Americans are injured every year by rodents, three and a half times the number bitten by the usual suspects, venomous snakes, skunks, foxes, bears, sharks, alligators and that ilk. I have been unable to get a breakdown on those rodent numbers, but incidents in the last decade convince me that our national and North America’s largest rodent, Castor canadensis, has to rank well with the worst.
In January 2001 there were reports from Manitoba of a killer beaver that broke into their kennel and beat the digested kibble out of two huge Newfoundland dogs. Had they been yappy petit-poodles, it would have been fathomable, even forgivable. The lady owner of the Newfs told her neighbours: “If you see it, shoot it, because I think there was really something wrong with this beaver.” There followed a chillingly similar incident in Calgary.
Around the same time, in Syracuse, New York, at rush hour, an “apparently” rabid beaver, foaming at the mouth and “rumoured” to be two times as large as normal, was rearing on its hind legs, then running after and snapping at vehicles. “Apparently?” “Rumoured?” Just give us some facts, such as: was it mating season? Many rodents rear up on their hind legs, froth at the mouth and gnash their teeth in mating display, and perhaps it is normal for pseudo-hermaphrodites (later!) to attempt mating with vehicles.
What kind of vehicles were they? Twice in recent years I have heard of politically-correct beavers felling a tree onto an outdoors person’s SUV. Any day I expect to see beavers near my Stump Ranch attacking logging trucks that pass every three minutes transporting precious and prime aspen beaver fodder to Japan to make bum wipe and chopsticks.
In January 2002 The Globe and Mail reported that transplanted Canadian beavers were rousting Russia’s native beaver population and damaging forests and farms.
Apparently our beavers are a younger species than the European strain, are more vigorous, have more stamina and flexibility. One British newspaper sniffed that our national rodents are “uncivilized brutes.”
In late September that year a Globe and Mail editorial, The Beaver Cried Uncle, described how a Prairie grain farmer tried everything to rid himself of his beaver problem, including giving them the third eye, but nothing worked until he played CBC One all night at top volume, whereupon the uncivilized brutes evacuated forthwith, probably to Russia, or Great Britain. “Is Castor canadensis trying to tell us something?” The Globe asks.
Our beavers uncivilized brutes; attack beavers? Just what is going on? Preliminary research shows that a high percentage of Canadian male beavers are “pseudo-hermaphrodites,” possessed of a uterus. But all “civilized” European male beavers, Castor fiber, are pseudo hermaphrodites. Are male Canadian beavers jealous? Is that why they invade Russia and Great Britain committing ethnic cleansing against the native brethren-sistern.
The real answer to the epidemic of unbeaverly behaviour is simply and probably that there are now more beavers in North America than there were beaver-felt hats worldwide at the height of the fur trade. Tom Wolfe, in his essay Oh Rotten Gotham, Sliding Down Into the Population Sink, discusses research showing that overcrowded rats turn into demented, sex perverts and ravening killers and compares their anti-social behaviour to that of the ravening, demented citizens of his own overcrowded hometown, New York city.
Dare we compare it to a variant of rodent rage, the beaver fever now rampant in Red Deer?
Author Will Cuppy may give an even simpler answer in a footnote to The Beaver in his book How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes: “The beaver was made to gnaw, and gnaw he does. There you have him in a nutshell.”
If you habitually eat yourself out of house and home and are getting too much competition from the clear cutters, you have to keep moving on, attacking and gnawing on whatever there is: Newfoundland dogs, SUV’s, logging trucks, even smaller pseudo-hermaphrodites.
Bob Scammell is an award-winning outdoors writer living in Red Deer.