Over here. I am proud to share my county with a beaver. It is apparently not the first beaver in Oxfordshire in five hundred years: last summer another beaver escaped from Cirencester and lived in the Cherwell before being recaptured and shipped back across the county line into Gloucestershire.
[It’s also good to see that someone mentions Gerald of Wales in the comments below the article, before it all begins to degenerate.]
Does this not imply that European beavers are kept as domestic pets? Now I’m no expert, having experience only of the (unbelievably destructive) Canadian beaver, a group, or band or whatever of whom are currently wreaking holy hell on the previously well-shaded creek behind my house. But I would not ascribe to them any of the qualities one normally associates with pets. Think of the furniture, for one thing.
It turns out that it is a mysterious Thames beaver!
http://www.24dash.com/news/Environment/2008-03-26-Mystery-surrounds-Thames-beaver
What’s the deal with beavers? I’ve always wondered…
They are fantastic animals.
Once at the Univeristy of Virginia, a Canadian Professor of History named Martin Havran delivered a very funny lecture on the differences between America and Canada. His punch line (and iwish icould reproduce his accent and tone )was “Your national animal is the eagle; Our national animal is the beaver.”