Beaver

Animal Series

by Rachel Poliquin

With unique fish-like tails, chainsaw teeth, a pungent musk, and astonishing building skills, beavers are unlike any other creature in the world. Not surprisingly, the extraordinary beaver has played a fascinating role in human history and has inspired a rich cultural tradition for millennia.  In Beaver , Rachel Poliquin explores four exceptional beaver beaver musk, beaver fur, beaver architecture, and beaver ecology, tracing the long evolutionary history of the two living species and revealing them to be survivors capable of withstanding ice ages, major droughts, and all predators, except humans. 

Widely hunted for their fur, beavers were a driving force behind the colonization of North America and remain, today, Canada’s national symbol. Poliquin examines depictions of beavers in Aesop’s Fables, American mythology, contemporary art, and environmental politics, and she explores the fact and fictions of beaver chain gangs, beaver-flavored ice cream, and South America’s ever-growing beaver population. And yes, she even examines the history of the sexual euphemism. Poliquin delights in the strange tales and improbable history of the beaver. Written in an accessible style for a broad readership, this beautifully illustrated book will appeal to anyone who enjoys long-forgotten animal lore and extraordinary animal biology.     

Genres: Nonfiction, Animals

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2015

Reviews

[Josh]

An unexpectedly fantastic book which delves into far more fascinating history than I ever imagined would exist for one of Canada's most emblematic animals. Here are a few tidbits from that history, briefly summarized:
- The Eurasian beaver population was severely reduced, and subsequently nearly brought to extinction, even before the North American beaver was discovered and exploited by Europeans. The two species are genetically highly similar, despite ~7 million years of divergent evolution,
- The word "musk" ultimately derives from the Indo-European root word "mus" (for mouse), so-called due to the fact that the musk pods of the male musk deer resemble mice. (Due to musk pods being mistaken for testicles), the Persian word "muska" means testicle, and is the proximal origin of the English word for what we now know as musk. Even more fascinating: the Sanskrit word for musk ("kasturi") derives from the Latin "castor" (beaver), because of its association with musk. (Perhaps even more fascinating: all carnivores [I believe this refers to the mammalian order Carnivora] include humans, as well as some snakes and other reptiles, possess anal scent glands.
- Beavers have a rich and utterly bizarre mythological legacy, starting as early as the Aesopian fable that beavers chew off their own testicles when being chased, to leave them behind for hunters to collect medicinal castoreum (many fallacies here, the least of which being that it is the musk gland rather than the testicles which excrete castoreum).

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book I’ve read from the Reaktion Animal Series, and I’m thrilled that there are now 70+ more books that I can read now. Thanks to the publisher for a great collection!

I came to this book after reading Rachel Poliquin’s other book, The Breathless Zoo. That book totally changed the way I viewed taxidermy, and helped me realize that rather than mere “trophies,” pieces of taxidermy were in fact deep repositories of many different types of longing — emotional, physical, spiritual. (The book has certainly given me lots to talk about whenever I see taxidermy out and about, a pretty common thing out here in certain parts of the Pacific Northwest.) So, despite the beaver being the state animal of Oregon (it’s on the reverse side of our state flag, even!), I realized I knew precious little about their lives and the sorts of histories they’ve affected. Poliquin’s book on beavers situates the long history of human-animal life together across different geographies, ideologies, and possibilities. I learned so much from this little 200 page book.

As is usually the case we animal histories, we find that “animals are good to think with,” and that in looking at our tangled relationships with different animals we can glean a history of our own changing ideas about nature. This is certainly no exception with beavers; in fact, given that beavers change the landscape and ecology of every place they go in fairly profound ways, these critters are particularly illustrative of how we think about our role in environments. Alternately sites of moral fables about how to live, repositories of pharmacological wealth, bearers of valuable fur, and agents of ecological renewal in the face of changing climates, the beaver has meant so many different things across time and place. One can even read much larger histories simply by starting with the beaver — how did we live (or not) with them, what kind of stories did we tell about them, and how have we used them for profit and prestige?

The book is nicely illustrated with images and great historical ephemera about the beaver, and Poliquin brings in some really excellent primary sources in her wide-ranging tale of the beaver. I particularly liked the sections on beaver society, and how some settlers viewed beaver cultures as exemplary models of how humans could live peacefully and without greed. Since beavers do build homes, and work their whole lives to maintain them, humans couldn’t help but read into this and find parables for how they too should live as being who change landscapes. This continues even to this day — the organic ease of beaver dams, and their humbling beauty, offers rich stories for humans looking for better ways to live.

The stories toward the end of the book are particularly interesting (and largely unresolved) as they take us up to the present. I was fascinated by the history of “Grey Owl,” a figure who is so emblematic of our conflicted ecological times, just as I was distraught by the eradication campaign currently underway in Patagonia to extirpate “invasive” beavers. (It bears lots of similarity to that Radiolab episode on the Galapagos extirpation of goats.) Through it all, I was most taken — as I usually am when reading histories of animals — by just how much humans can and should continue to learn by taking animals seriously, and by questioning the many threads of our interconnected lives.