Prometheus

Letter: Solve Southborough’s Beaver Problem Non-Lethally

Linda Huebner

Your Sept. 19 story, Southborough Board Of Health OKs Beaver Trapping, missed one important point. Most conflicts between humans and beavers can be solved non-lethally; trapping is usually not necessary.

If they continue to pursue trapping, Southborough officials will soon learn the hard way that it’s impossible to permanently solve problems with beavers by killing them; more beavers will return, plug culverts and rebuild dams repeatedly if the habitat suits them. Fortunately, it is possible to out-smart beavers by using water flow devices, which maintain enough water to allow territorial beavers to remain but keep the level low enough to avoid conflicts. The devices protect culverts from being blocked by beavers and/or create permanent leaks in the dams that beavers cannot repair, and therefore control the water level, maintaining it at whatever depth has been set by the placement of the device. Unlike trapping, flow devices are long-term solutions — they have a 98-99 percent success rate and can last as long as a decade; they’re also cost-effective, humane and environmentally-friendly.

Trapping has never controlled the beaver population and it is, at best, a temporary, local solution. There are more than 800 properly installed and maintained water flow devices, designed for each location’s topography and water flow, working successfully all over Massachusetts to resolve beaver flooding conflicts. Southborough should join the communities across the Commonwealth that are using non-lethal solutions to address beaver-related conflicts whenever possible.

Linda Huebner
Deputy Director, Advocacy
Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
Boston, Mass.

Nicely done Linda! Pointed, clear and passionate! I love to see a letter in defense of beavers that I didn’t write! I connected with Linda through Mike Callahan of beaver solutions. They have worked together for many years and if you watch the testimonial section of his DVD she is the last commenter. It occurs to me that I’m not sure why beavers get such a resounding defense from the SPCA in Massachusetts and so little outcry everywhere else, but I’m guessing it has to do with the 1996 trapping law. I honestly wish I saw 50 letters like this a year from every state.

Still, I may have to take issue with this one sentence, “If they continue to pursue trapping, Southborough officials will soon learn the hard way”. Since the town did the very same thing last year and probably the year before that, I very much doubt that its reasonable to assume they will learn anything from this experience whatsoever.

betterkit2012JPG — Beaver kit 2012-Photo Cheryl Reynolds

Beavers back in Southborough

A beaver dam blocks part of the Sudbury River in this file photo from 2011.

For the second year in a row, the town will hire trappers to take care of beavers building dams off Cordaville Road near the Ashland town line. “They’re back,” Public Works Superintendent Karen Galligan told the Board of Health last week.

I guess the nice thing about a city that makes the same mistake over and over again is that you save so much money on reporter time. Just run the same story you wrote last year, and dig up that photo from 2011. Heck, I’m sure you’re hiring the same trapper with the same taxpayer funds. I can even send my same letter to Karen and the reporter that I did last year and the year before that. We all save time.

(New money though. That trapper will want to be paid in real dollars, not a xerox of last years dollars.)

Hey! I have an idea! What if Southborough invested an ounce of prevention instead of a pound of cure? 75 miles away from Beaver Solutions you could hire Mike to install a flow device that fixes this problem for the next decade. Then the beavers could stay and use their own territorial behaviors to keep others away. Don’t like the idea of paying money for someone out of town? Then spend a pittance here or here and learn how to fix the problem yourself. Think of all the free time you’d have to do the work once you stop presenting your case to the board of healthy and whining to the media.

The money quote:

Health members again granted a permit to trap beavers, remarking that they wished there was something else that could be done to keep the beavers from coming back.

Obviously you just need to kill them EXTRA good this time. It didn’t take before. And maybe hire a more expensive trapper so they die more slowly and completely. Whatever you do, don’t waste any taxpayer dollars installing a culvert fence or a flow device or anything. Because that would just be silly.