“”You’re not going to kill it are you?” It was a question he tried to deflect by saying that the beavers were being captured alive in cage traps, treated humanely, and that his methods not only were legal but had won the praises of animal protection groups. His customer, on the other hand, usually didn’t ask. Asking would result in an answer they didn’t want to hear. They wanted to assume that the animals causing their problems would be removed by LaFountain and then relocated to some place where they could live happily ever after” (Sterba, 63).

This quote reminded me of a quote in Tallamy’s piece The Vital New Role of the Suburban Garden. On page 23 Tallamy writes, “We feel completely justified in sending plants and animals that depend on those habitats off to make do some place else. This is partly because no one is going to choose a pollywog over a human if presented with such a choice, and partly because, until recently, there always had been someplace else for nature to thrive.” One of my interests as a environmental major is environmental justice. While reading these quotes I found a connection to EJ because a common problem that we face in America is the idea that we can just ship the annoyances off somewhere else, but when you ship these things somewhere else they become someone else’s problem. And we tend to not think about who we are shipping our problem off to, because as long as it’s not affecting us we don’t care enough to change the decisions.

“Don LaFountain stopped calling himself a “recreational trapper” and started calling himself a “professional wildlife damage controller.” The difference? As a weekend hobbyist, he could sell the pelt of each dead beaver he trapped for $20, more or less depending on the vagaries for the fur auction market. As a licensed professional, he could charge $150 for removing a “problem beaver,” $750 for removing a typical family of five, and $1000 and more for installing “beaver deceivers”” (Sterba, 83).

I thought this quote was interesting because it brought me back to the idea of response paper #2 and the importance of naming. We talked a couple times in class about this idea of how important choosing a name is (ie the names of national parks, wilderness areas etc) and also the importance of knowing the names of things (like types of birds, trees etc), I think this is a clear example.