Looks like the joys of killing beavers has gotten a whole lot more affordable. Apparently it’s free on August 27 in Tennessee.
What a great way to celebrate the start of Hamster squirrel season! Why not take care of some pesky beaver problems for free and let Junior have some more practice shooting the gun. Better yet, the state of Louisiana (where my very own great grandmother once owned a general store in Hannibal before the turn of the century) just got rid of 258 laws! Making it fully legal to shoot beaver without a permit any day of the year (provided you use a silencer if you shoot them at night). Bad luck for the otter and mink that try to raid crawdad ponds.
But if you’ve got raccoons, armadillos, opossums, nutria, beaver or other varmints raiding your crops, protection levees or crawfish ponds at night, you’ll be able to use new devices to kill them, thanks to three new laws. Act 64 adds otter, muskrat and mink to the list of “nuisance” animals for shooting with .17-caliber and .22-caliber rifles or with shotguns up to 12-gauge to protect crawfish ponds. Act 169 allows silencers on “outlaw quadrupeds” and nutria and beaver. Act 95 makes other changes.
Well now, the 2009 stats for USDA tell me that American taxpayers footed the bill for over a million animal deaths in this state alone. Having people kill them for free themselves is certainly cheaper.
Don’t ask about the long term costs of all that habitat and wetland lost – it would just confuse the matter.
