London, New York and the German town of Hamelin are all reputed to have struggled, from time to time, with too many rats.
In Grenville-sur-la-Rouge, in Quebec, it is beavers. A booming populace of about eight hundred beavers has been blamed for flooding parts of the town and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.
“It’s a constant battle,” said Tom Arnold, 61, who was elected mayor four years ago and found himself charged with dismantling beaver dams. “About 20 per cent of our municipality is being swamped by these guys.”
The town stands on the north bank of the Ottawa River, halfway between Ottawa and Montreal, on land that rises into the Laurentian Mountains and is riven with watercourses. Wolves and coyotes once preyed on the beavers, “but we have decided that we don’t want any wolves and coyotes around”, Arnold said.
Trappers once used to hunt beavers and “forty years ago, they would deal with them”, he said. “Since then the value of the fur has gone down to next to nothing, people are not interested in trapping them.”
Advertisement
The beavers have multiplied, constructing about two hundred dams in the district, he said. One of these was blamed for the destruction of a road.
“It cost us C$300,000-C$400,000 [£175,000-£230,000] to repair the road, apart from the money it cost from all the people losing access,” Arnold said. “The provincial law puts the onus on the local municipality to remove the obstructions that could cause damage.”
The town can also be held liable for damage it causes to properties downstream after removing a dam. “There is jurisprudence on that, the municipality has to pay one hundred per cent of the damage, the legal responsibility is very serious.
“Then you have a federal law that says beavers are protected. It’s unbelievable, the complexity of the beaver problem.”
He has called for the local beavers to be eradicated, though he is not convinced that this will solve matters. “The problem is you will never catch all of them. And they will migrate. Let’s say you decided tomorrow morning, ‘I’m going to remove all the beavers.’ You can guarantee the following spring there will be a migration to our municipality from a neighbouring town.”
Advertisement
He believes that a larger, collective response will be needed to take on the beavers. “I’m getting feedback from different places. The indigenous people have a position, the government has a position. Everybody has a position. We’ve got to find a solution.”
Farmers in the town who have lost crops “fight with them”, he said, but some landowners do not. “Some of them like the look of the beavers. I respect that. They like to have beavers on their property.”
The mayor says that since he first spoke publicly about the beaver problem on Canadian radio he has received many messages from critics saying “oh, poor little beavers” and supporters urging him to “get rid of them”. “But we are left paying for the damage these guys are causing.”
