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They might in the future more than ever before engage in hunting beavers.

I used to hunt and fish.

I have two brothers and we basically spent our lives playing in the woods, falling in ponds, getting chased by wasps and riding donkeys that we shouldn't have been riding.

I was just different. When the other kids gravitated to football or basketball, I went fishing and skating. I was into trapping animals, pheasants and squirrels. Not only was I trapper, I was a taxidermist.

I was a hunter and fisherman, and many a time I have slipped out into the woods and prairies at 4 a.m. and brought home plenty of game, or have gone in a canoe to the cove and brought back a good supply of fresh fish.

I practically lived in the woods when I was a kid, avoiding grown-ups and my dysfunctional family, pretending I was half-wolf, a feral child who napped in nests made out of ferns, ate wild blueberries, and wove sticks and feathers into her hair.

I was perhaps about 10 years old when a local farmer rang us up to say he had found a young badger and would we take it in. So we did; it was a female called Bessy and she lived in the boiler room. She was extremely intelligent, had a very low opinion of cats but loved the dogs. She was pretty well trained; she went in the car.

I have spent my entire life living in a zoo, which is pretty crazy. Not many kids get to say that, and it took me until I was about three years old to realize that we didn't just come to the zoo every day, that we actually lived here.

I ran around with the other youngsters, hunting, fishing and raising tadpoles and all the rest.