Beaver joke not so funny in N.C. Charlotte Observer

Supporters of wildlife program say McCain’s gag shows he doesn’t know the dam issue.

WASHINGTON “How does one manage a beaver?” U.S. Sen. John McCain asked his followers from the Senate floor this week.

McCain’s derisive comments – “$650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi,” he typed on his Twitter mini-blog – came as part of his continuing campaign against directed spending, or earmarks, in the federal government.

But he angered workers in North Carolina who say they know full well how to manage beavers:

Trap the critters, blow up their dams and let the water flow.

Honestly, you’d think after two years of this battle I’d be fairly immune to the meaness of spirit humans can show to beavers, but this article made me physically sick. North Carolina tackles “Beaver Management” with the same expansive forward-thinking that Hitler used to face “the Jewish Problem”.

And our stimulus money is paying for it. Because nothing gets the economy rolling like dead beavers.

North Carolina, beavers are caught in humane traps that kill them instantly. The state does not allow them to be moved, Heisterberg said. The dams then are broken apart with hand tools or, if they’re inside culverts, destroyed with explosives.

His office determines how much damage its program prevents by figuring up the repair and replacement costs to the Department of Transportation and private landowners.

This past year, 44 of the state’s hundred counties paid $4,000 each to join the federal/state partnership on managing beavers. Among them are Johnston, Harnett, Nash and Franklin.

In Washington, the N.C. Farm Bureau has put in the earmark request to Congress for the state’s federal share of $208,000, said Parker, the organization’s lobbyist.

So the Charlotte Observer is writing this indignantly that McCain would mock serious beaver-killing money as if it was something useless as say, volcano-monitoring, and I understand their point but its not MY point. My point is that this should highlight for all that the entire state of North Carolina knows how to use only beaver extermination as a problem-solving method.

That’s like carrying around an entire toolbox with only hammers.

Mind you this is a state with water shortage problems, and lots of hunters who’d like a nice wooduck or two to shoot at. They have reason to figure out a different solution. But Killing beavers is serious work, the paper defends

In 2001, a freight train derailed in Pitt County after flooding weakened a rail bed near a beaver dam. Chemicals spilled from 30 rail cars, said Jon Heisterberg, state director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s APHIS wildlife services’ division.

A week ago, Heisterberg took a handful of state legislative staff members to a pair of culverts under Highway 301 in Rocky Mount. There, he said, 5-foot-tall beaver dams threatened to take over the 8-foot-tall culverts.

“It would have clogged all the way if we hadn’t taken care of it,” Heisterberg said.

Wow, railway issues are very serious. They couldn’t possibly be handled without extermination right? Check out this testimonial from Mike Callahan’s Beaver Solutions webpage:

So the paper and Mr Heisterberg get a letter: