“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord.” Isaiah 55:8.
In an earlier issue we briefly looked at the large rodent called nutria under the name coypu. Here’s another account of it under its other name of nutria. In Argentina, the place where the Creator arranged their homeland, it was the native Indians who called the nutria by a different name—coypu, which means water-sweeper. For several reasons some of them were brought to the swamplands of Louisiana about 90 years ago and set free, and they have become a serious problem there as the years have gone by.
One of those reasons was the demand for their beautiful furs. Also, it was hoped that they would destroy troublesome plants that were taking over the Louisiana swamps. Although nutria occasionally eat a snail or small fish, they eat mostly vegetation which they devour while swimming or wading in the shallow swamps. But the people who brought them to Louisiana failed to try this out on the nutria before taking them out of Argentina, and the result was that they didn’t do what was expected of them in their new homes.
The lively animals soon discovered that just a short distance from their new homes there were tasty rice and sugarcane crops which some of them took over. Farmers naturally complained loudly about the damage they did.
Actually, if they would just leave the rice and sugarcane alone the wild tangled vegetation in the swamps not only supplies ample food for them, but also helps hide them from alligators and big birds such as herons and eagles. Also, the young can be raised in burrows dug into the soft swamp banks where a mother may have eight or nine babies a year. They are born with a full coat of fur, with their eyes open and quite capable of promptly taking care of themselves.
The biggest problem about these water-loving animals is trying to control their ever-increasing numbers. A recent estimate is that there are 20 million of them. When fur sales are good that’s just fine with those in the fur business, and the nutria population is kept in pretty good control. But as people are now tending to buy fewer fur coats, there is a serious question whether the increasing number of these animals will be a problem too great to handle.
This reminds us that often the plans of men and women and boys and girls don’t work out, just as the nutria plans didn’t work out. This is usually because we think our ideas are good and fail to pray to the Lord for His guidance. The very middle verse of the Bible (Psalm 118:8) says, “It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.” Have you put your trust in Him?
ML-01/19/1992