alt Hacker NewsIt's funny to me, a Canadian, that this even warrants a did-you-know article because everything about the beaver fur/hat making industry is something I learned extensively about in elementary and high school because it was like, a major driver of the European exploration and colonization and therefore significant to the history of my country.
But outside of here it's just a footnote to a fashion trend.
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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.
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