The Current - How the beaver became the official symbol of Canada

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Do you know the story of how the beaver became an official symbol of Canada in 1975? Hint: it involved a real live beaver peeing on a CBC radio host during an anti-American campaign to "Keep the beaver Canadian!" We bring you the remarkable tale — and look at how it relates to the moment we're in right now politically with the US. Plus, a trip to the Utah desert, where our national symbol has become a conservation hero. We speak with Nate Norman, director of the Beaver Ecology & Relocation Collaborative at Utah State University, and Colin Coates, professor of Canadian studies and history at York University.

One summer evening when she was 20 years old, something terrible happened to Vienna-Luk. I can't figure it out, but I do know that it was a violation. Then people started asking questions. What a creep. Who else knows about this? From CBC's personally, this is Agent Leila, the story of how a victim went undercover. So bring it on. Let's go. Let's get a confession. Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast.

Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. A lot of things can happen on live radio. I've done some things, but I've never been peed on by a beaver. There, no. There, that's great. Oh, how nice for you. Such a lovely boy. And he's peeing on me.

Oh, no. That's my mom. No. Oh, no. It doesn't stop. Anyway, someone better rescue it. Merry Christmas, Al. It's a fun.

Listen, it's never happened before on the radio, I'm sure. You're sure you're right. That's Alan Maitland, co-host of the CBC radio program, as it happens, interviewing a beaver in 1974. 51 years ago, in March of 1975, the beaver became an official national symbol of Canada. And it all started because of a spat with our neighbors to the south. We'll hear more on that in just a moment.

but today, during a similarly tense time in Canada-U.S. relations, we are going to start with a beaver tail below the border, where Canada's symbol, the eager and mighty beaver, is becoming a conservation hero in an unlikely place. That place is the Utah Desert. Nate Norman is a live beaver trapper and director of the Beaver Ecology and Relocation Collaborative at Utah State University. And we spoke last week when Nate was, as one does, attending the BeaverCon in Minneapolis. Here's our conversation. What is BeaverCon? I guess BeaverCon is a conference. It happens every two years. It is just everything Beaver, where we come together and we talk about beavers and the things that they do for us on the environment and how we can keep them there.

There's a lot of fun, the BeaverCon. Oh, it's a lot of fun. All kinds of great stories. And it almost feels like I'm in school returning for the summer break. and hanging out with all my friends again. The stories that you would bring are stories of this project that relocates beavers in the Utah desert

to help save drought-stricken rivers. Tell me a little bit about this and why this is necessary. How bad was the drought before you brought in the beavers? Well, Utah's always been a really dry area. You know, it's in the desert. And the removal of all the beavers

historically has just added to that. And so, you know, we've had a lot of issues with ranchers and farmers that are losing water, and it's really important for their operations. And then we have a lot of people that live in Utah deserts as well. And so water's always just been a big issue. So the beavers have been able to help store some of that water and keep it on the landscape for us. How did you land on the beaver as the fix for a drought-stricken region? Well, there was a couple of professors at Utah State University that kind of started with a thing called BDA, which is a fake beaver dam. And they started putting those in to try to kind of slow the water and work as if they were a beaver. But in the end, they found that it's always better to have the real thing. So that's where I kind of got started in our program with life trapping and putting the beavers in where they've sometimes started.

the restoration process with these BDAs and then brought the real engineer in to take over. Bevers are known as a keystone species. What does that mean? Well, the beavers and the water and the ponds that they create aren't only good for the beavers. They're good for all the animals. They're the engineer that does all the work and builds all the dams and all the other animals benefit from that. So when you take the beaver out of the equation, it's detrimental to a lot of other species as well. And so with this project, you're trying to put the beaver back into the equation. How does that work? So where the beavers used to hang out was in the valley bottoms, and those are the areas where we've moved in and built our infrastructure and our homes and all those

sort of things. And the beavers have become nuisance or problems, I should say, in those areas. and, you know, most of the time, the only way to take care of that was to lethally remove them. So our program kind of got involved to both help the landowners out where we can provide a non-lethal option and then work with our partners with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the Forest Service to take the beavers back up into the mountains and find some good areas for them to, you know, do what they do, but not create too much conflict. And so you are a live beaver trapper. Tell me about trapping the beavers.

What is that like? Oh, man, I could go on and on. Yeah, basically we get calls to go out and try to help people with their problem beavers. And we set traps. We have three different kinds of traps that we use. A suitcase trap being the most common. That just kind of has a trigger and closes up. up like a big suitcase on springs.

And, yeah, we use a beaver scent to try to lure the beaver into the trap. And we check our traps every morning to make sure that our beavers don't have to spend too much time in that trap. And so then we bring them in and quarantine them and get them back out into the wild. What's the beaver bunkhouse? Ah, the beaver bunkhouse is where we keep our beavers. The beavers, by requirement from the state, need to be able to. quarantine for at least three days, but we also try to get all of the beaver family together.

So when trapping, you know, it's not always that easy. They don't all jump in the trap at the same time. I wouldn't think so, no. Yeah, we have to kind of work to get the entire family put together and there's, you know, a large beaver family. They have kits from not only this season, but from the previous season, so families can be up to 12 beavers. So we bring them into the bunkhouse, And while we're getting them all there, we care for them. We clean their water. We do some, we call it the bunkhouse and we check in our beavers into the bunkhouse. So we do a little, you know, assessment of their health and determine their sex and give them some medicine, some Ivermectin to kind of clean their guts out.

Yeah, it's a neat little area. We use a lot of volunteers to help us out with the care of the beavers also. What are the beavers like in the bunkhouse? I mean, my experience with beavers has been just seeing them in a river or a pond or a lake or what have you or maybe dragging something across a road. I can't say that I've gotten that close to a beaver before. What is it like in the bunkhouse when the whole family's in there? Yeah, so you've never got peed on one. I have not been peed on by a beaver now.

Well, I have. Yeah, at the bunk house, we have, they're kind of like a large dog kennel area. just give you some reference. And we go in there every day and we have to clean out the kennel and we open up what we make is a little lodge for them. And as we open the lodge with some of these big families, they just kind of come rolling out like a clown car of one beaver after another and they sort of waddle slowly down into the water where they stay kind of while we're cleaning the kennels.

But, you know, some of them, they all have personalities. Some of them will slap their tails at us. We had one that was so sloppy. We called him Bam Bam. We have some that are a little bit more feisty, you know, and kind of hits at us and tell us they don't like us. But most of them are really chill, really calm. And, yeah, we let volunteers right in with the kennels with them.

And we can basically, you know, keep them off of a little snow shovel if there's ever an issue. But in general, they're really docile. And, yeah, the kits. I should say the kids are so cute and curious. They'll come right up to you. We feed them little treats of carrots and sweet potatoes, and they'll want to come up and just, you know, grab those from you and chew them and eat them right there in front of you.

These animals, this sounds really cute, by the way. These animals are really important, right, to the ecosystem. Part of what you're doing at BeaverCon, and this is a conference for wetlands and wildlife, they're really important to the broader ecosystem, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, especially in the West, I mean, I can speak from where I'm from. In Utah, you know, we get most of our precipitation come down as snow in the mountains, right, during the winter.

So every spring we have floods, right? And then after the floods, you know, subside, then we have a completely dry, hot summer, and the streams all dry up. And, you know, what the beavers do is they're creating these little ponds, little reservoirs all up and down the stream. and that slows the water as it's coming down in the spring and then holds the water throughout the summer. So we get less flooding and more water for the entire year. So yeah, it's super important. Everything in the desert needs water.

So it's a real ecological advantage to have them on the landscape. When you see the beaver doing its work going back and forth and kind of doing what it does but doing it in a place where you've put it, what goes through your mind? Oh, it's just incredible. you know, for one, we were able to save that beaver, right, and give it another chance. But then to see the restoration work that it's doing to improve that habitat, and you start to see all the other animals and everything come back to those areas.

You know, we get moose, we get fish, we get birds and bats and, you know, big game. All of that kind of centers around the beaver ponds. So it's just a beautiful sight to see a newly-euvre. established beaver area and all their ponds and all the things that it does for all the wildlife. You know, just finally, we here in Canada can get pretty protective of the beaver as a national symbol. And so what would you say to listeners here in this country during, I mean, it is, I think it's fair to say, a pretty tense moment between our country and yours about the role of the beaver on your side of the border. What would you say to us here about that? Well, I would say that the

beaver doesn't see borders. And they help out everybody and look out for the natural world. And in doing so, they help all of us. And I think that is just a great lesson we could learn from the beavers. You're a great ambassador for the beaver, Nate. Well, I like them a lot. It's good to talk to you with this. Thank you very much. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you. Nate Norman is a live beaver trapper and director of the Beaver Ecology and Relocation Collaborative at Utah State University. We reached him at BeaverCon. It's a conference for wetlands and wildlife in Minneapolis. One summer evening when she was 20 years old, something terrible happened to Vienna, Luke. I can't figure it out, but I do know that it was a violation.

Then people started asking questions. What a creep. Who else knows about this? From CBC's personally, this is Agent Leila. The story of how a victim went undercover. So bring it on, let's go. Let's get a confession. Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. How exactly did the beaver come to be an emblem of Canada? In 1974, a campaign began to make the beaver an official symbol of this nation.

Thousands of Canadians wrote letters. In support of the beaver, we got our producers to voice some. of those letters. The beaver has always been unofficially the Canadian emblem, since it is a part of our natural wildlife. Therefore, it should be adopted formally by the Canadian federal government before it is overtaken by our hungry neighbor. There's enough American domination in Canada without allowing our symbols to be stolen as well. Keep your hands off our beaver. The little creatures build well. Somehow, to me, beavers mean Canada. New York is busy as a beaver stealing our damage. emblem. The beaver represents industriousness, skill and hard work. If we should lose the beaver,

we shall lose the oldest and most valued symbol of our Canadian culture. Don't let them Yankees steal everything from us. They already have our land, businesses, oil, water, etc., etc. Please, don't let them take our beaver. Colin Coates is a professor of Canadian Studies in History at Glendon College, York University. And earlier this year, published a piece in Canada's Parliamentary Review titled, Please Save the Beaver for Canada. legislating a national symbol, 1975. Collins on Hornby Island in British Columbia this morning. Colin, good morning to you.

Good morning. What goes through your mind? We'll get to the robust conversations around the beaver as a national symbol in a moment. But when you hear what this creature, what this animal is doing south of the border, a conservation hero in Utah, the desert, what goes through your mind? Well, I entirely agree that in many parts of North America, the beaver has been a keystone species, that it creates an environment that is important to many other species as well.

That doesn't necessarily mean that everybody likes the beaver. It dams rivers, and that is not something that the people whose land is flooded out are necessarily in favor of, but it's a really important keystone species, and of course extremely important in Canadian history because of the importance of the fur trade. Go back to 1974, December of 1974. When the beaver was in the As It Happened studio, Alan Maitland was interviewing a beaver, the beaver peed on him.

Can you take us back to that moment and describe what exactly was going on there and why they brought a beaver into the studio in the first place? So what happened is that there's an American, a Republican state senator in New York, Bernard Smith, who wanted to introduce a bill in the New York legislature to make the beaver a state symbol.

And New York state has a lot of different symbols. was just adding one more. So it would be the state animal. Initially, Canadians didn't particularly notice, but then a journalist at the Toronto son, Mark Bonakowski, mentioned it to former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's office. And from there, John Diefenbaker's executive assistant, Keith Martin, passed this story on to Sean O'Sullivan,

who was at that point the youngest member of Parliament, He was 22 years old, had just been elected not too long before, the MP for Hamilton Wentworth. And he wanted to raise it in the House of Commons. It was just around Christmas time. It was a campaign led by Sean O'Sullivan and as it happens. And that Christmas New Year's period

is often a bit of a slow time for news, but it spread like wildfire. And thousands and thousands of Canadians wrote to their end. MPs, particularly Sean O'Sullivan, to the Secretary of State, and to as it happens, apparently as it happens, had bagfuls of letters and petitions that they received on this topic. And Canadians were almost unanimously outraged that New York State wanted to adopt the beaver as a state symbol. As it happens, in addition to having the beaver in studio, commissioned a French horn quartet to perform something, a piece of music that was about the beaver. beaver, and to your point, bags and bags of actual, you know, handwritten letters arrive in the

offices. How do you understand what was happening there? Why do you think this idea of an American state attempting to adopt the beaver as a symbol set Canadians off? It was partly people recognizing that the beaver played an important role in Canadian history, but more importantly, I think that Canadians were saying the beaver is already a symbol. It has to remain a symbol of Canada. If Canada adopts it officially, then New York State couldn't do it, which really was not true. But that was the many letters, and I've read the letters that are in the files of the Secretary of State, that's what they're saying. We've got to stop the Americans from taking over this Canadian symbol. And this is the way to do it, is to make it. It's kind of like copyrighting. I think that was,

I don't think anybody used that particular word, but I think there was a sense that if Canada adopts it first, then it's copyrighted and the Americans can't adopt it. And it really fit into a larger sense of, I would say, kind of vernacular anti-Americanism during the time, at a time in which, let's face it, tensions between Canada, the United States weren't nearly what they are today. But there were definitely concerns in Canada. This is a time of Richard Nixon and the end of his presidency,

the final days of the Vietnam War, the oil embargo. You know, this was a difficult time in North American history, but it's, again, doesn't really compare to what's going on right now. Which is why you say that the beaver became, and the beaver issue became a metaphor for U.S. imperialism in Canada. That's right, yeah. Yes.

As you mentioned earlier, not everybody loves the beaver. If you were a farmer and you're seeing your, you know, fields get flooded, or you're seeing your property be destroyed because the beaver's chewing down the tree. There are people who don't like the beaver and they see them as a pest in some ways, right? That's right. And so one of the more recent example is the former senator, Nicole Eaton, who stated in the Senate in 2011 that the beaver was a, a dently defective rat and that it shouldn't be the symbol of Canada. And instead Canada should adopt a polar bear as its symbol. And of course, that idea didn't go anywhere. It's hard enough to adopt a national

symbol in the Canadian system. We don't have that many official national symbols in Canada, beyond obviously things like the anthem and the flag. And it took a long time to have hockey and lacrosse recognized as the national games of Canada. What do you think it is, aside from the destruction and the comparisons to a rat, What is it about the beaver that so many Canadians love and embrace? People tend to project human characteristics onto beavers. And so they tend to say a beaver is Canadian because it is industrious, because it's smart, because it's ecological, sometimes because it's monogamous.

This is one of the things that comes up in the way that people talk about beavers. And so they really want to project human characteristics on it. The problem with that is that beavers are natural species in much of the United States as well as, you know, in Utah and further south. Historically, there were a lot more beavers all throughout North America. And so it's not an animal that's exclusive to Canada. What happened with that U.S. Senator's bill in New York to name the beaver an official state animal? So, Bernard Smith had exchanges with Sean O'Sman. Sullivan and he essentially said, you know, you can have the beaver, we can have the beaver too.

And there's historical reasons why the beaver could be a symbol of New York State. The fur trade was, you know, in the 17th century, in the 1600s was an important part of the European expansion into that part of North America. But he essentially said, we can have it too. And, you know, to be fair, he was correct. It really didn't stop New York State from having the beaver as a symbol. Canadians were able to claim the beaver as well. So it did pass in New York State a bit later in July of 1975, along with, I think, the brook trout became one of the official fish, the official freshwater fish of New York State. And they've added a whole bunch of other symbols since then there's a muffin, an official state muffin and so on. So they have lots of symbols of New York State.

And this is just one of them. But in the Canadian context, it really touched a raw nerve to see the Americans trying to say that the beaver would be a state symbol. Do you see parallels to the moment we're in now? I don't know whether beavers have elbows or not. But the whole elbows up thing suggests that the conversation that we're having could be very much of this time. I know that we're talking about what happened in 1975. But it really does feel like a parallel with the moment that we're in right now. Do you see that?

I do, and I do see in a way I think I understand, you know, I read all those letters that went to the Secretary of State and that went to, or in Sean O'Sullivan's archives at Brock University. And, you know, many of them were fairly well-humored. Some of them were really angry. And I think I understand the anger a bit more than I did when I first did the research a few years ago. This is something that really, you know, Canadians are hurting right now because of what is. happening south of the border and the constant slights that we're experiencing from representatives of the American government. So in a way, I understand this a bit better. Again, there was a strong playfulness to much of the campaign, particularly the as

it happens team obviously saw this in kind of a jocular way, but it really did touch a raw nerve. And again, so many people were upset about it. And yes, I understand it even better now in the current. context than I did a few years ago. That Canadians just don't, they don't like it if particularly the Americans try to, try to take something, claim something that we believe is ours. That's right.

And again, even though the Americans could have a claim to the beaver, I mean, at that point in 1970s, there weren't a lot of beaver left in New York State. They had been hunted to extinction more or less, as has happened through much of North America. And one of the interesting things is the reintroduction of beavers in places like Utah that have happened, or that's happening now in England that beavers are being brought back for some of the same reasons that Nate Norman was talking about to manage what are now drought conditions in some parts of that country. So, yes, there's a concern about what the beavers can do in areas. And the Canadians were the same, the beaver has always been here.

Of course, it was trapped out in many parts of what is now Canada. You might remember a few years ago, Beaver wandered into Royal York Station in Toronto. And this was really quite an exciting thing in local news because you don't often get bevers in subway stations. But, you know, very close to the Humber River, it kind of made sense that would be around there. You could see a parallel just finally with the Lake America, Lake Ontario business as well. Some people might just write that off as a president who says something on, social media, you know, scribbles his name on a piece of paper, what have you. There are a lot of Canadians who are deeply offended by that and say, this is us and this is

about who we are, and how dare you? Exactly. I entirely agree. I was catching a plane a couple of weeks ago and the pilot said, I just wanted to tell you where Montreal is. It's 150 nautical miles from Lake Ontario. And, you know, he said that for the people in the plane. And, you know, this is touching a chord for Canadians. I mean, it's profoundly silly many of the things that the Americans are saying right now. But it really has hurt, I think it really has hurt Canadians to have their sense of sovereignty, their sense of identity, being challenged in these really fairly stupid ways. Colin, good to talk to you about this. Thank you very

much. Thank you. Colin Coates is a professor of Canadian Studies in history at Glendon College, York University. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBCC, podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.