“They might in the future more than ever before engage in hunting beavers.”
– Samuel de Champlain

We have a bunch of feral cats that roam campus after dark and periodically leave their kittens in bushes for us to find, we had a young bull moose on campus that trampled two cars once before being tranquilized, we have tons of deer that come down from the mountains and graze the lawns and landscaping in the early hours of the morning (once when walking to a class I heard a snapping of branches to my left, looked up and not three feet of me was a young buck munching on acorns, as placid as a cow).  You get what I’m saying, right, lovelies?  We attract the wildlife at Undisclosed University, we are pals with Mother Nature,  we can deal with the fluffy and furry.

But every once in a while something weird happens.

For example, when a beaver crawled into a truck engine like a cat and road to campus from parts unknown.  When it arrived outside the student center and the truck came to a halt, the beaver shot out and began running around looking for a new place to hid – prompting our dispatchers to be flooded with calls of, “There’s, like, a huge rat over here!” and “Kill it kill it kill it kill it!” and “My daughter just called me and told me there was a rabies infested rodent terrorizing students, and I want to make a safety complaint.”

Our officers were on the case.  Armed with long poles with a lasso like loop on the end of them, they chased the beaver around campus until in Animal Control moved in to take over, by which point the beaver had retreated to another truck engine and was stubbornly refusing to budge.

We were simultaneously setting up a sting operation for stolen electronics and dealing with a domestic violence incident that required most of our on duty officers to diffuse.

And that, my pumpkins, is what we call “Friday.”