Honestly, sometimes you wake up and read the beaver headlines and it’s tough to decide which one is the worst, Is it better to be ignorant and misinformed or just WRONG. I think misinformed is better. Because we can hope someday things will get better. I doubt very much there’s any hope at all for the Grey Lady when it comes to beavers. Ian Austen’s article is no exception.

Beaver Dams Mean No Love Lost for Canada’s Emblematic Animal

ALGONQUIN PROVINCIAL PARK, Ontario — The beaver may be one of Canada’s official national symbols, as iconic as the maple leaf, but Canadians have a love-hate relationship with the creature, with the emphasis for many more on the second emotion.

Some communities in Alberta offer bounties on beavers’ tails. A mayor in Quebec has called for them to be “eradicated.” Fingers of blame frequently point their way, rightly or wrongly, for highway washouts, including some with fatal consequences. Farmers look on with despair as their land vanishes beneath a beaver pond.

For the second time in the past 15 years, Colleen Watson watched this summer as beavers flooded a 100-acre woodlot in the Atlantic province of New Brunswick that her grandfather, a blacksmith, took as payment from a customer during the Great Depression.

“I love to see the nature, right? You can watch it do its thing,” Mrs. Watson said in a tone more of exasperation than anger with the animal. “The hate is what it’s done to my property.”

Yes that’s right. Isn’t it amazing how even though it’s their national symbol Canadians still hate to be inconvenienced? Shocking! Americans are nothing like that.

This year witnessed a number of notable episodes: Beavers chomped through a fiber optic cable, cutting off internet service to Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, and a subway station in Toronto was shut down after a lost beaver took a tour.

A lot of likely beaver-linked offenses are blamed by the authorities on “weather events,” as when a beaver pond is overwhelmed by rain, but sometimes the police catch them red-handed (a beaver’s feet are webbed, its front paws are not). In May, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police got their beaver in a case involving stolen wooden fence posts. (The crime’s location was a reminder that beavers are not Canada’s only cute, but hardly cuddly wild animal: Porcupine Plain, Saskatchewan.)

Figuring out just how much damage beavers cause each year is difficult, said Glynnis Hood, a professor of environmental science at the University of Alberta and an unabashed champion of beavers. She was part of a research project that determined that beavers cost cities and towns in Alberta at least 3 million Canadian dollars a year, but she called that a “very, very low estimate” because many municipalities simply had no idea what they spent on beaver-related repairs.

Professor Hood herself is no stranger to unwelcome beaver behavior. This year, a beaver family hauled away several trees from in front of her house.

Oh Glynnis, you have to stop doing these interviews. Whenever someone from the times calls they just want to talk about how bad beavers are and they can’t listen to any of the good things they do. From now on whenever you answer the phone and the other end says NYT just like and say you’re pet sitting and Glynnis is on vacation.