Good intentions gone bad…I imagine a scene in some small town west of here, maybe Ohio or Indiana. A woman is admitted to the ER with multiple lacerations on her arms and wrists and when she attempts to explain the cause of her injuries, she stumbles on the words and can barely get them out. It was an animal, she mumbled, in fact a young beaver that had caused her such grievous harm. No, she had never owned a beaver before—actually, not any kind of pet animal—and had only purchased him the day before so there was a significant learning curve no matter what the animal species.

She was doing a favor for a friend, her boyfriend in fact, but when asked by the ER doctor, she was unaware why it was being done, only that it seemed very important to her boyfriend as he had insisted on it on several occasions. She was going to surprise him so he didn’t know that she was in the ER, didn’t even know that she had purchased the animal. It was all done in secret.

In her doctor-induced delirium, morphine and codeine dripping into her vein, she said again and again that she didn’t think he even liked animals, certainly not dogs or cats because he owned neither. She explained in a meander that she was in the small confines of her upstairs bathroom, and that when she turned on the electric razor, the animal just went insane with fear, flailing about snapping, scratching and biting at her…thus the extensive tooth and claw damage to her arms.

Why her boyfriend would want the small rodent looking thing completely shaved, she said, was still a mystery to her.