In the Canadian bush, you'll run into people still running beaver traplines. From what I hear it's mostly for nuisance control since pelt prices are quite low. When I was talking to trappers, they seemed to imply that the government sets prices and buys them like as a cartel, but I'm not sure what the process is or if I understood correctly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapline#Registered_traplines

Thanks for sharing this discrepancy!

Indeed, the "beaver as relevant tool as major driver" does actually not exist in schools in EU mainland; the chance is higher you hear about the porks brought by first European-immigrants that they used for food production because of their fast reproduction numbers.

(and porks are easy to deal with, they eat everything; Once I heard someone from crime enforcement saying: "the perfect murdery would be to feed the dead body to a herd of porks because they would even eat the teeth from the body")

We learned about it here in Minnesota, too! But I suppose we are about as close to Canadian as you can get without actually crossing the border.

Some people speculate that the USA gained control of Oregon country in large part because Canadians/Brits trading in beaver furs had to send all their pelts back to the UK before they could go out to the rest of the world. America just sailed from Boston to the PNW, traded for pelts and went directly to, say, China. Much faster, and cheaper too.

Beavers are big in canadiana but only Oregon put one on its flag, albeit on the back.

It looks like silk top hats were still being made in the 60s so presumably it might still be possible to find people that worked in the factory and recover the knowledge if people really cared.

So it's a top hat? Or not?

One wonders just how badly contaminated the building and local groundwater might be.

My daughter once spent a bunch of time going through all the flag emojis classifying them as stars, animals, trees, religious symbols (and probably some others). We found three flags with maps. Animals were almost exclusively birds, but there was also a sheep, a pair of lions, seahorses, a lobster and a conch.

The Astor Place subway station also contains several beaver tiles / bas-reliefs, because John Jacob Astor made his fortune with beaver pelts. EDIT: see https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/beavers-john-jacob-astor

$1.2 Million worth of wetland restoration and years of ecological revue skipped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver-engineered_dam_in_the_C...

I think if we hadn't we would've figured it out anyway. Someone would have found them interesting enough to study.