[69] in Humor
HUMOR: Dave - The beavers are striking back, and they could land anywhere
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Mon Feb 14 09:30:02 1994
From: abennett@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 94 09:27:51 EST
To: humor@MIT.EDU
The beavers are striking back, and they could land anywhere
by Dave Barry
Today's topic -- and we wish to stress that this has
nothing whatsoever to do with the Clinton administration -- is
Beavers In The News.
Here at the Center For Being Alarmed, we have been
monitoring the beaver situation for more than two years now, and
we feel that the time has come to alert you, the public, to what
is going on, so that you can take appropriate action in the form
of whimpering in terror.
Let's review the sequence of events, bearing in mind that
we are not making ANY of these events up; they all were reported
in actual newspaper items sent in by many alert readers.
We will start with 1992, when wildlife authorities in
Chelmsford, Mass., in an effort to control the burgeoning local
beaver population, decided to have a team of veterinarians give
them (the beavers) vasectomies. The New Haven Register stated:
"The beavers will be enticed with tasty bark to swim into traps.
... Female beavers will be released, but males will be held and
vasectomized."
At this point, the question you are asking yourself is:
"How does The New Haven Register know the bark is tasty?" Trust
me, it knows. It is staffed by journalism professionals.
Anyway, while authorities in Chelmsford were vasectomizing
male beavers, authorities in Colorado were attempting to implant
Norplant contraceptive devices in female beavers. This effort was
covered extensively in The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News
(which at one point ran this headline: "BEAVERS GET NORPLANT WHILE
WOMEN WAIT IN LINE").
The highlight of this effort occurred when wildlife
authorities invited the press to a Denver veterinary hospital to
witness the first beaver implant, which was to be performed by Dr.
David Robinson. Everything was ready: The cameras were rolling,
and the sedated beaver was on the operating table, breathing
anesthetic gas through a little cone over its snout. Robinson,
wearing a rubber glove (you don't want to take any chances, not
with your modern, sexually active beaver) made one final
examination, and then announced: "It's a male."
The News published a wonderful photograph of this event,
showing Robinson with his arms around the beaver, groping his (the
beaver's) private region, looking concerned.
"The problem with beavers is, their sexual organs are
drawn way up inside their body cavities," explained Robinson, in
a statement that will elicit strong beaver envy from any male
human who was ever pedaling a bicycle hard when the chain broke.
Now we move to 1993, during which the following news items
were published (we are still not making any of this up):
The Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review reported that a
beaver chewed through a 100-foot tree, which fell on a "passing
wood-chip truck," causing about $2,000 damage. The Review
reported that "The driver and police were laughing over the
incident, with jokes flying about the beaver ambushing the truck
in order to get at the tantalizing wood chips."
The Associated Press reported on a lawsuit in Chippewa
Falls, Wis., resulting from an incident wherein "a beaver chewed
through a tree, causing it to fall on a fence, allowing Holstein
heifers to escape from a pasture and wander onto some railroad
tracks." Eight heifers were killed by a train.
The Winnipeg (Canada) Free Press reported that a 71-year-
old outdoorsman was sitting on the tailgate of his pickup truck
when he felt a sharp pain. "He looked down," reported The Free
Press, "and realized a large beaver had sunk its teeth into his
left leg." Fortunately -- and let this be a lesson to those who
would limit the rights of citizens to keep and bear hockey sticks
-- the man had a hockey stick. "He beaned the beaver several
times until it clamped on to his hockey stick with its teeth,"
stated The Free Press.
(We received one other extremely alarming beaver report in
1993 but we are too tasteful to mention it here, because it
involved an incident on the Brule River in Wisconsin wherein a
beaver gnawed through a tree in such a way that it landed in a
fatal manner on a canoeist.)
So the pattern is clear: The beavers are striking back.
Perhaps you are not concerned about this. Perhaps you live in an
urban area, and think you're safe from attack. Perhaps you are a
fool. Consider the following item from the Dec. 15, 1990,
installment of the syndicated feature Ripley's Believe It Or Not:
"In the 1950s, beavers WERE DROPPED BY PARACHUTE IN
CALIFORNIA to build dams in areas threatened by erosion!"
That's right: Beavers can be dropped from airplanes. They
could land ANYWHERE. And please do not be so naive as to try to
tell us that the government would not do such a thing. The
government, and we say this as a loyal, taxpaying citizen, is
completely out of its mind. The government is perfectly capable of
suddenly deciding to drop mass quantities of beavers on urban
areas, especially if an economist suggests that this might create
jobs.
So that is the situation. Nobody is safe. What can you do?
You can be on constant alert. You can refuse to sleep and
constantly dart your eyes around in a nervous manner. You can
carry a hockey stick at all times, even to work. Perhaps your co-
workers will laugh. Perhaps your boss will want to have a word
with you.
Perhaps he will beg like a yellow dog for your help when
he feels the Chomp of Doom on his ankle.
(C) 1994 THE MIAMI HERALD
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
