One of my favorite Homer Simpson lines is:

Heh heh heh, Lisa! Vampires are make-believe, just like elves and gremlins and Eskimos.

Homer does have a point. Eskimos sound about as implausible as abominable snowmen: the latter supposedly live at extreme altitudes, the former at extreme latitudes.

I have to admit as well to not really believing in beavers. Or at least not that beavers build huge dams. Granted, I’ve seen beavers, and I’ve seen beaver dams and hundreds of trees felled by beavers.* But the sheer scale of their engineering works doesn’t fit within my usual conceptual parameters for what animals do.

Here, for example, is a beaver dam in Canada that’s 2,800 feet across.

Heck, it’s hard for humans to build something so environmentally intrusive these days. If beavers were human residents of California, their typical dam would probably take at least five years just to get the environmental impact statement filed and all the permits nailed down. How can they do all that construction work without any lawyers or environmental consultants who used to work for the EPA?

P.S. As commenter Rapparee suggests, Pygmies are obviously some kind of ridiculous European myth that has been disproven by Science.

* But I haven’t ever seen a beaver building a beaver dam. They do all their work at night, we are told. They would say that, wouldn’t they?