Beaver Tales: Audrey Tournay and the Aspen Valley Beavers

This is the story of one woman's crusade to save beavers. The writer runs the Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary in Ontario, Canada. It's a sanctuary that accepts all kinds of wildlife and nurses and nurtures them until most of them can be released back into the wild. But the writer has a special affinity for beavers and in addition to the regular work of nursing and nurturing she and individual beavers do a whole lot of education, especially in schools.The writer is both literate and passionate about her subject. For many years she has been called upon to deal with the aftermath of human interaction with beavers. Farmers dynamite dams and she gets a phone call from a concerned observer "All the beavers seem to be dead except this one kit who is hurt/burned/starving. Can you help?" And so arrives Quibble, or Casey or Cassidy. One beaver at a time to be healed physically and emotionally as best a human can.Transposed upon this "one at a time" are the facts and statistics: Canada was explored and developed in order to obtain beaver pelts. The beaver appears on the Canadian nickel not because it embodies the virtue of hard work but because it was once the back bone of the Canadian economy. And the writer points out that even now trappers in Canada "harvest" between 150,000 and 184,000 beaver pelts every year. (I'm Canadian, by the way, but it isn't just Canada that traps animals.) And these numbers don't count the number of beaver dams dynamited because they are inconvenient for farmers, home-owners and city planners.The strength of this book lies in the juxtaposition of the mindless dreadful cruelty of mankind and the quiet humanity of rescuers and nurturers like the writer. (How can you fathom the mind of a reporter who turns up to do a story at the Wildlife Sanctuary wearing a beaver coat?) I loved this book. I laughed, I cried and I ended up angry and sleepless. Thank you Audrey Tournay and Boston Mills Press for a book I shall long remember.