I have more of these rare testes I can drop, I don't know how to do an album thru chapochat.

    • shitstorm [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      It's from an old Greek fable about beaver's chewing off their testicles to escape hunters. Weird medieval Christians turned it into a metaphor for abstinence.

    • MagisterSinister [he/him,comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      They're slowly recovering, but it's difficult in western Europe because their little landscaping projects quickly end up causing conflicts with local landowners. Large wilderness areas as seen in the US or Canada just aren't a thing in my country, even the most remote parts of our national parks in the Alps are at best 10 miles from the next road. There's a lot of potential habitats in rural areas, but there's always humans living close by, and they get mad when you build a dam in their back yard.

      • MichoganGayFrog [they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Being Canadian, I was taught that beaver pelts were a big part of French people colonizing parts of the place, I figured it was cause beavers just weren't in Europe and fops wanted a new animal to wear. Didn't know the war on beavers had gone on so long

        • Barabas [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          The depletion of European beaver was a big driver of colonization of Canada. Gotta get that beaver skin and sniff those castor sacs.

          • MichoganGayFrog [they/them]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Dang, knew they really wanted some skins and sacs, just didn't know it was cause they ran out at home.

        • MagisterSinister [he/him,comrade/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          The sub-polar wildlife is really similar across Europe, Asia and America due to the Bering Strait being frozen during the last ice age. Most Northern Eurasian mammal species have an equivalent in Northern America. There's even European bisons - which were down to a single herd in Poland after WWII. Almost anything here has been hunted close to extinction. And when we discovered there's a whole continent with animals really similar to ours, first thing we did was go over there and kill as many as possible.

          • MichoganGayFrog [they/them]
            ·
            4 years ago

            That makes sense. I knew some northern European animals had Canadian equivalents, just didn't know that beavers were part of that. Euros fucking hate animals.