In the year of Canada’s 150th anniversary, a petition is calling for the City of Kingston to stop killing the national animal as a flood-control measure.The online petition, which on Monday afternoon had almost 500 signatures, calls for the city to instead install flow devices to prevent beaver dam flooding.

“This is the national emblem. I don’t understand Canadians,” Sue Meech, founder and president of the Sandy Pines Wildlife Centre in Napanee., said.“It shouldn’t be that our standard reaction to an animal problem is to kill it.”

Meech said that when a beaver is killed, often through the use of an underwater trap, the beaver’s offspring — called kits — also die.

“They set underwater traps and the poor things are trapped under in there. They hold their breath as long as they can,” Meech said.

Collins-Bayridge Coun. Lisa Osanic is working on a motion to bring in an expert from Boston to train city staff on non-lethal ways to mitigate flooding from beaver dams.“I am talking to London, Ont., as they are already using flood devices under any beaver dams causing problems,” she said.

The motion will likely be put forward this summer.

Good for you all! And good for Kingston that it is having this discussion rather than simply business as usual. I’m not sure how a petition with 500 signatures that hasn’t yet been ‘put forward’ ends up as a headline, but obviously someone has a very good publicist. Here’s the petition, which this morning has 739 signatures and is better  worded than the article.

Stop Killing Beavers in Kingston

Beavers are important to our wetlands. There are ways to control flooding that do not destruct beaver dams. Right now, the City of Kingston’s policy is to hire a trapper to kill beavers. Other cities such as London, Ontario, do not. They install flow devices to prevent beaver dam flooding. This petition urges Kingston City Council to begin using humane, non-lethal flow devices to resolve beaver dam flooding. There is an expert in Boston. He taught staff in the City of London how to install these flow devices and if the expert came to Kingston, he could teach the City of Kingston staff too.

Maybe we should all sign it too? I’m happier because it discusses alternatives to trapping, which the article doesn’t. For the record, I feel it’s generally more persuasive to tap into self-interest than compassion. So I’m more likely to say that beavers are good for salmon or pollution removal than to protest that leaving orphans is mean.

It is mean, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want my arguments to be so easy to marginalize by folks blaming just the tree-huggers or vegans. I think that killing beavers means taking away their ecosystem services from a whole community and I want people to worry about that more than they do.

I am a firm believer that self-interest is our only truly renewable resource.