Peel police say alleged alligator sighting in Brampton pond was a beaver

Social media lit up Friday night with reports from Peel Regional Police on its Twitter account of a possible alligator sighting in a Brampton storm drainage pond, but animal control authorities have since determined it was just a beaver.

Constable Akhil Mooken said dispatchers received a call at approximately 8:30 p.m. from someone claiming they had seen a 5-to-6-foot alligator in a pond in the area of Creditview Road and James Potter Road.

Officers and animal control officers were dispatched to the scene, but police said late Friday night the search for the alleged alligator would resume in daylight on Saturday. However, that Mooken said won’t be necessary after video footage showed the creature to be a beaver.

Ahh, the famous beaver-alligator confusion. It happens. I mean I’m so old I can remember a town in in southern Germany that thought they had a crocodile when they really had a beaver. I mean never mind that most crocodiles live in salt water and all of them are cold blooded and all of Germany gets a lot of snow. People get fanciful ideas about beaver.

They Just do.

I made this handy guide for the confused Germans years ago, Confused Canadians are welcome to use it though. It pretty much still applies.

“Animal control officers attended the scene and upon viewing video on social media of the animal in the water, they determined that it was a beaver,” he told the Brampton Guardian early Saturday morning.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say this was the very best day to be a police officer ever. I mean you go out ready to crawl into a sewer and catch an alligator and when you get there your partner shows you a video of a beaver on your phone and you both spend the rest of the shift laughing and telling everyone else..

Just in case you wonder about the difference, Florida reader Kathy Rothman’s excellent capture can help you make the distinction: