Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at a crisis meeting blamed beavers for exacerbating flooding problems in Central Europe caused by heavy rains that have claimed at least 16 lives and forced the evacuation of people in Poland and the Czech Republic, highlighting concerns about the safety of dams and dykes that he believes are threatened by the activities of these animals, on Tuesday, the 24th of September, reports Politico.
Beavers build dams for protection and shelter, but some researchers, with whom Tusk agrees, say that beaver dams can damage river banks, weaken levees and cause water to accumulate, increasing the risk of flooding.
“Sometimes you have to choose between the love of animals and the safety of the city and the villages and the stability of the dams,” Tusk said, adding that infrastructure must be protected from beavers and that the government will allow any action, within law, against beavers to protect levees.
“Do whatever you have to do, I will defend these decisions. Dams are now an absolute priority,” Tusk said.
But environmental biologist and beaver expert Andrzej Czech told Politico that Tusk’s remarks were “nonsense” and that the Warsaw government was using beavers for “purely political” purposes “to prove that the government has found an effective and quick scapegoat on the flood issue”.
Czech pointed out that hunters and farmers, who are influential in Tusk’s coalition partner, the agro-conservative PSL, often oppose beavers because they sometimes flood fields and crops, adding that “only 2% of beaver sites” cause these problems.
Czech argues that “hunters are interested in improving their bad public image by appearing as rescuers and problem solvers, and they hope to get taxpayers’ money for shooting beavers”, as happened during the African swine fever crisis.
He added that beaver hunting could lead to “massive destruction of beaver habitats, reduction of natural retention, violation of regulations and general anger”, stressing that “this is not the right way” to fight it.
The expert suggested that embankments could be protected from beavers by placing a net around them. He admitted that this was “not a brilliant solution” but argued that it was much cheaper than paying for beaver hunting.
Ecologists argue that rather than contributing to natural disasters such as floods, forest fires and droughts, beavers are an essential part of the solution because they contribute to healthy wetland systems, which in turn sequester carbon and slow the flow of rivers.
In the late 1990s, beavers were close to extinction in Europe, leading to illegal efforts to restore the mammals to water bodies, and there are now more than 1.2 million beavers in Europe, according to a report.