“I’ve come up with the definitive answer for the question: If you could time travel to any place, any time, where would you go?
I’d go to late 1940’s America.
Why?
Well, for one thing, I probably wouldn’t die of plague or some shit. But also, it kinda seems like any crackpot idea that a person could come up with was on the table. Want to raise a baby by terrifying it with loud sounds? Seems reasonable. Wanna dose a bunch of people with LSD, just see what happens? No problem.
Want to relocate beavers that are annoying the shit out of everyone in an Idaho settlement by putting them in boxes with parachutes and air-dropping them in a remote area? Why the hell not? Give me ONE good reason why not.
I can’t decide which part of this story is more funny to me. First, there’s Geronimo, a beaver who went on multiple test drops to make sure the contraption worked, that he’d be safe and able to escape the box after he landed. Apparently, Geronimo would run willingly back into the box, which was interpreted as him not minding the repeated drops. I cannot claim to know much about beaver behavior, but it does pose a great dillemma for PETA and the like: If we discover that beavers enjoy skydiving, should we give them the opportunity? I mean, obviously it’s not natural for them to do that, but now that we’re presented with the information that beavers may very much enjoy dropping out of planes, so…? I don’t even know, man.
The other is that 75 of the 76 beavers dropped made a successful landing. Apparently one beaver was in a box where some strapping got caught up, he crawled out a little early, and plummeted. But hey, 75 out of 76 beavers is a MUCH higher survival rate than I would’ve expected from an era where it seems like they did A LOT of injecting people with hepatitis because…I don’t know, they could? I suppose it’s a more humane treatment to drop them from a plane that it would’ve been to blast em. So that’s something.
Was this the first truly environmentalist action? It HAS to be the first one that involved parachuting animals into a better environment. And probably the only one until that Operation Dumbo Drop. By the way, if you roll over to ODD’s IMDB page, the first review is from a guy who took part in the real-life version, which I had NO IDEA was even a thing.”