BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

Jun 29, 2005, 13:48 GMT

Belarus government warns on growing beaver numbers

Minsk - Top Belarussian scientists declared the former Soviet republic's burgeoning beaver population "a public threat" and called for thousands of the animals to be killed, according to a Wednesday Interfax news agency report.

A report from the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, the senior research institution in the country, said beavers "now number more than 45,000, and have settled in absolutely all regions of the republic."

Naturalists put the number at little more than 15,000 a decade ago. The unprecedented growth and the rodents' energetic wood-cutting and digging "is inflicting serious harm on forests, agriculture, and the public road network," the report said.

"This not only causes economic harm to Belarus...but reduces the habitat of other large mammals such as the bison and deer," the report said.

Beavers' normal enemies are primarily wolves, fox, and mink. All have been hunted to near extinction in Belarus - the wolves and fox because Belarussian farmers consider them dangerous to livestock, and the mink because of the value of their pelts.

Belarussian beavers as a result have become Europe's largest, with big males tipping the scales at over 20 kilos. The animals are losing their fear of man, and the country's first recorded attack of a beaver on a human took place in the Grodno region two years ago, the report noted.

The Academy recommended Belarussian forest rangers trap and kill at least 3,000 beavers each year to control the animals' population.

The Belarussian government would not only earn income from the beavers' pelts, but from "beaver meat and beaver urine, which is valuable in medicine," the report claimed.

Beavers became for practical purposes a protected species in Belarus in 1996, after authoritarian President Aleksander Lukashenko took power and drastically limited Belarussians' rights to hunt.

Since then the country's beaver population has nearly tripled. The animals' dam building, tunnel digging, and canal construction have flooded tens of thousands of hectares of woods and swamp land, and at some locations undermined highways and railroad embankments.

c dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Source:

http://science.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1025756.php/Belarus_government_warns_on_growing_beaver_numbers