Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

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Have you ever lived next to a place with beavers? I don't recommended it.

First, if you have a pond beavers will come over at night and dig holes the width of a basketball about a meter from the edge of the pond into the water (vertically down, then sideways). They camouflage these holes or they simply overgrow, good luck to an unsuspecting human that had his/her leg fall into such a deep hole.

Then, they dig such holes and passages into earthworks designed as flood defenses. Huge amount of money goes into fixing such earthworks.

Finally, if you(or anyone nearby) happen to have drainage channels or small rivers, these will be blocked by beavers to the point of flooding the surrounding area. Various compensation schemes exist, but not everyone has documentation to use them.

Fibally,a braver can be a very dangerous animal when startled/provoked/cornered. Around here every person is told in their youth, "don't approach beavers" or if they bite you in the leg (usually groin area) you'll bled out in 20s.

No, beavers are not nice... If course they shouldn't be eradicated, but they should be managed properly, not enjoy 100% protection as they do here in Poland, for example.

That's nothing. I once lived next to a colony of industrious critters, who practically carpeted over a millennia old habitat to lay down refined rocks that they periodically dug up and relaid just so that they could haul more refined rocks through the habitat without stopping, usually on these large wheeled containers that sporadically would kill everything in sight. Was a nightmare to live there.

Yeah, there are animals much worse than beavers--some of them even walk on two legs!

Note that this does not really reduces the validity of the comment you react to. Beavers could probably say pretty much the same thing. "Did you try living next to humans? I do not recommend it. Not only do they break the dams we took so long to build, but they love to put stupid wire around the best trees. And some of them even have rifles and will shoot without warning. At least I could bite one in the groin!"

I know how annoying it can be to have wild animals destroy your property (there are for instance beavers, racoons, wild boars and woodpeckers where I live, and I own a wooden house), but in principle we do not have more right to shaping our habitat the way we like than beavers and wildlife in general. More than "managing beavers", what we need is to find ways to co-exist peacefully. One part might be "managing" them, but another part is definitely to accept that their needs in part conflict with ours, and that we need to give them some space and accept some of the damage as a price to pay to share land with them.

> Fibally,a braver can be a very dangerous animal when startled/provoked/cornered. Around here every person is told in their youth, "don't approach beavers" or if they bite you in the leg (usually groin area) you'll bled out in 20s.

Don't approach wild animals if you don't want them to bite you? This is just common sense.

Overall, the issues you discuss pale in comparison to the benefits they provide. Humans have built developments where naturally there would be beavers if they hadn't been wiped out. The lesson isn't that we need to fight nature harder to preserve our victories against it. The lesson is that we need to be more thoughtful so our developments aren't incompatible with beneficial natural processes.

If there were a way to domesticate them, they’d be amazing work animals

You also you need to wrap trees with metal net to save them from beavers. At least they have great fur(looks superb trimmed a bit) and taste good.

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