Yesterday was crazy with beaver activity in the news, but the awesome part that tipped my scales on the wow-meter was that one of the folks of the friends of the free beavers on the River Tay in Scotland got a Freedom of Information Act request from DEFRA with all the correspondence on beavers in the British waterways.

That means all the emails where they talked about lying, got ready to lie, lied and bragged to each other about lying are there for the world to see. The request had been public around 6 hours when this story was published in the Guardian.

Health watchdog contradicts claims Devon beavers pose human health risk

Officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have repeatedly said that the beavers, thought to be the first in the wild in England for centuries, could threaten human health because they may be carrying a disease that the UK is currently free of.

But Defra documents and emails, released under Freedom of Information rules, reveal that while Public Health England (PHE) is concerned about the disease, it does not believe the beavers would increase the risk to human health from the tapeworm, Echinococcus multilocularis (EM).

“PHE accept that the main risk of an incursion is likely to be through international movements of pets, both legal and illegal… Therefore they are not convinced that the three Devon beavers necessarily represent a significant increase in overall risk,” a Defra official emailed colleagues after meeting with Public Health England.

But that’s the special lie we picked! Are you saying it doesn’t sound true enough to the experts? We’re DEFRA. We’ll make it true! So they went on their merry way saying there was a chance of disease even though the experts told them there wasn’t. And that’s why THIS was the email heard around the world.

The whole cache is a treasure trove, especially the indignant letters from citizens outraged at the decision and their pained justifying responses.See if you can find mine! It’s nice to know that those things are kept somewhere, although it did give me a mad longing to see the FOIA on correspondence regarding the Martinez Beavers in 2007.

(Mostly I just want to see letters between the mayor and Mary Tappel. But that’s just me.)

If you’re too mature to have fun playing in DEFRA’s dirty underthings, there was also an EXCELLENT beaver report on NPR KNAU in Arizona yesterday. Click to listen to a short but sweet reminder of why beavers matter.

And just in case you thought the beaver news cycle passed Martinez by, they rolled out the swanky new website for our sponsor Inquiring Systems Inc yesterday. Check us out under ““projects“. I think we’re placed according to how many hits we get, because we keep moving around. So CLICK on this, please and remind the world that beavers matter.