Educational Analogies: the Beaver's Tale                                                          Mike Reddin -  rev Nov 2003

The motto of the London School of Economics and Political Science was adopted in 1922. It takes a phrase from Virgil  “(Felix qui potuit)  rerum cognoscere causas” which translates as ... “Happy is the one who seeks to know the causes of things”.   Note the plural form - the causes  - Virgil had no room for monocausality.  

Somewhat less apparent and, on reflection perhaps less endearing, is one other aspect of LSE's associated coat-of-arms.  It displays two symbols - books (for learning, hard to object to them) and, in profile, the North American Beaver chosen “as representing an industrious animal with social habits.”   I would like to explore with you some of these beaverly habits - and ask whether they ought to persist in the LSE of the 21^st century.  I think that Virgil's words are commendable, the book might be better shown as a URL or Web site, but the Beaver? 

Please note, as a disclaimer, that some of my best friends are beavers or hang out with, or know somebody who knows somebody who is or was a beaver.  (There is also a European beaver – which seems to share the North American beaver's social behaviours - and is, I hear, slowly working its way back into the European environment and British rivers.  I wish it good fortune).  

I doubt if the North American beaver was chosen by LSE's founders (the Webbs, George Bernard Shaw et al) with any greater depth of thought than has been devoted elsewhere to the selection of 'symbolic' flora or fauna.   That great contemporary American commentator Dave Barry of the Miami Herald (now syndicated to the world) - has written with such feeling of the quest for such symbolism, especially by the USA, for an Official National Insect.  As Barry notes - in response to the proposal to nominate the Monarch butterfly to the post - "Needless to say, I am strongly in favour of having an official national insect.  If history teaches us one thing it is that a nation that has no national insect is a nation that probably also does not celebrate Soybean Awareness Month.   I also have no problem with the monarch butterfly per se ('per se’ is Greek for 'unless it lays eggs in my salad’).”

However, he goes on to note ...."In the light of other countries’ choices" (he cites the Soviet choice of the Chernobyl Glowing Beetle which grows to a length of 17 feet and can mate in mid-air with military aircraft) .... "the US may need something more substantial.  In South Florida for example we have industrial cockroaches that have to be equipped with loud warning beepers so that you can get out of their way when they back up.”

But I digress.  What of the beaver?  What is it like? Is it ‘industrious’? Is it social?  Is it ecologically sound - or even politically correct?   It seems to score rather badly on most counts.    Some would say the beaver is nature’s way of reminding us how destructive we can be of our social environment as the price of personal satisfaction.  Here comes the beaver, head down, sees some trees and - the adrenalin rush must be enormous - goes for it!   Bite, bite, chew, chew, grind, grind - say farewell to the upright pine.   Moving with all the tenacity of an urban redeveloper (1) the beaver progresses through his self-proclaimed neighbourhood with all the amity of Terminator II. 

True, the beaver is a driven thing; inspired in part by a fundamental need to chew - for without such activity, like all such rodents with their massive incisors, the teeth go on growing, the jaw is forced apart - and the animal, unable to eat, starves to death.  Now there’s an analogy for you - don’t chew your food properly and you will die - how much parental advice, would be finally vindicated!  Thus, non-chewing beavers die of inertia; high fibre is essential to the diet/dental health; stop reading your books and inwardly digesting .... and you’ll fail your exams; at worst, like something out of Alien III - don’t use your brain and it will outgrow you and implode!

Meanwhile ... back at the dam, the beaver just goes on and on, chewing and felling and dam building above and beyond the call of duty.  Somewhere, back in the mists of evolutionary beaver-time, I suspect that something vertical seriously offended the beaver soul. Successive generations now commit themselves to make the upright horizontal, to bring the tallest tree down to the level ground.  The beaver as 'one who levels knowledge, making it accessible to the lowly' is a nice pedagogic possibility.

At times then, our beaver is an instrument of apparently wanton destruction; 'inefficiently’ despoiling the forests to create just one dam, and one small breeding/living chamber within it.  If you are in a beaver neighbourhood you may find one that conveniently locates a ready assembled heap of driftwood, but most seem to be original builders. Like aspirant architects they feel compelled to start from scratch, as if nobody had ever built before; they do little recycling, although they may 'relocate’ a phenomenal amount of timber.   So, tree-felling to excess, blocking waterways, with as much sensitivity and thoughtfulness for others as the average prop forward, it builds a ‘nest,’ a ‘home’ - and there amidst the wasted forest and clogged lakes it proclaims to its partner - "It’s Spring - it’s time for business”.  

And are they sociable?  Well, they seem relatively private creatures - they do their own thing (dam-building) in a decidedly un-cooperative way.   And, as with most animals they engage in precious little overtly collaborative behaviour with anybody other than beavers!   For instance, they don’t go round and ask the bears for help, nor offer to fell some winter timber for the other hibernators in return for a bit of help with log-rolling.(2)  

So, returning to the analogous merits of the beaver as role model - it seems to me that the self-centred and the self-sufficient are ecologically unsound – and poor exemplars for a university life. As students and teachers and above all as people, we are on an inter-dependent planet.  We have not been, to date, are not now and we will not be - 'sufficient unto ourselves’'. Self-sufficiency is a nonsense, an unreal and wildly 'inefficient' social strategy.   For two reasons only, bear the beaver in mind.   First, watch out for falling trees and second, to rephrase Rhett Butler (and a well-known beaver proverb) - “Give a damn".

Block no streams, do no harm.

Footnotes

1. Urban redevelopers are, in James Baldwin’s phrase, “people intent on replacing negroes with trees”).  

2. Introducing a Natural History series (November 2002) on BBC TV, Sir David Attenborough reported on his recent filming with a crew looking into the social behaviour of the North American beaver.   New camera techniques enabled them to 'implant' cameras within the beaver's lodge and monitor life from within the bunker.   To their surprise they discovered occasions when Mr & Mrs Beaver did not live 'alone' but that - visible for the first time with infra red cameras in the lodge's total darkness - a family of musk rat shared the space.   The musk rats exited from time to time as did the beaver to swim down from the exit hole below water level to gather weeds to bring them back into the lodge to sustain themselves over the winter months.  Whether this was a truly symbiotic relationship, whether beaver's enjoy the musk rat company (reputably they're great story tellers and comedians) or were none the wiser in the darkness - whether the beavers and the musk-rats enjoy any mutual advantages in this dark shared space from having this landlord/tenant relationship? ... remains to be reported.

3. The LSE Student Union 'adopted' the London Zoo's beavers, contributing to an adoption/sponsorship scheme which has kept these fine rodents in nourishment and lodging over the past several years.