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Jaws? More like Gnaws.
Rabid beavers are terrorizing Tri-State vacation hotspots this summer, biting several people across NY and NJ, and sparking fears of an outbreak among locals.
Indeed, New York’s state animal appears to be chomping more than just wood of late. Recently, two swimmers were attacked by one of the rabid rodents on Turtle Island, Lake George, prompting officials to warn swimmers to steer clear of the area.
“We were like, okay, it’s just out for blood,” recalled one of the victims, who sustained multiple bites after trying to rip the critter off his friend.
While the beaver later turned up dead, it is possible that it “infected others in the beaver colony at Turtle Island,” reps for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) told The Post.
This followed another incident in May, where a foaming-at-the-mouth furbearer — which had already bitten several people — mauled an 8-year-old boy who was fishing with his family in Lake Henry, New Jersey.
Thankfully, family friends intervened and catapulted the demonic dam-builder back in the water in a viral video, after which tests confirmed it was indeed suffering from hydrophobia.
But is the Tri-State area experiencing a Zom-beav apocalypse — or is the fear overblown? Let’s leave it to beaver experts to explain.
Should we be worried about rabies?
Wildlife experts generally disagree that the Empire State is now a chomping ground for rabies-stricken rodents.
In fact, only 40 confirmed rabid beavers were reported from 2002 to 2021. Meanwhile, there have been no known transmissions from the Empire State mascot to humans.
Beaver watcher Skip Lisle scoffed at the term “outbreak” to describe the rabid beaver attacks. He runs Beaver Deceivers, a company dedicated to protecting infrastructure from rodent-induced flooding sans trapping or killing them.
“Every now and then, apparently, a beaver will get rabies,” the wildlife biologist told The Post, adding that it’s “extremely, extremely rare in my experience.”
Felix Lankester, a Professor at Washington State University, Paul G. Allen School for Global Health, told The Post that these water-loving woodchippers are “a minor vector compared to raccoons, skunks, foxes, and bats, which are the main rabies reservoir species in North America.”
“Importantly, beavers tend to be infected incidentally rather than sustaining their own separate viral strain,” he said. “So they are what we call dead-end hosts as there’s no self-sustaining beaver-to-beaver rabies cycle.”
Bite worse than its ‘bark’
However, in the rare event that one of these bark biters strikes, it can hurt like a motherchucker thanks to dental hardware powerful enough to fell a medium-sized tree in a single night.
Last year, medics at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, documented the case of a man who was attacked by a rabid beaver in Connecticut, sustaining multiple deep lacerations to his arms and chest, as seen in graphic photos.
In a super rare incident in 2013, a 60-year-old fisherman in Belarus died after trying to pick up a healthy animal for a picture, the Guardian reported. Its incisors severed a major artery, causing him to bleed to death.
Lisle noted that non-rabid beavers can also behave aggressively if swimmers venture too close to “a lodge with kits.”
And don’t think about outswimming one of these industrious living buzzsaws. These roly-poly rodents can shred water at up to 6mph — twice as fast as the average human.
Along with inflicting serious injuries, beaver bites can transmit diseases ranging from leptospirosis to tularemia.
Knock on wood-eater
How does one avoid getting bitten by one of these aquatic “Cujos,” which are notably the largest rodents in North America, capable of topping 70 pounds?
The DEC advised: “Boaters and campers should exercise utmost caution and are advised to avoid contact with beaver (including carcasses) while recreating.”
Lisle advised watching for warning signs of rabies, including beavers out during the day — they’re primarily nocturnal — and chasing people on land or in water far from the lodge.
“If a beaver’s swimming around during the day in, say, a public swimming area where they would not have a lodge or kits nearby, that’s time to get out of the water roughly,” he said.
Thankfully, attacks by the busy creatures are “extremely rare and pretty easy to avoid if you’re paying attention,” said Lisle.
Unlike with bears and sharks, there isn’t much info on fending off a rabid beaver. In 2018, a man named Dan Wherley used a paddle to thwack an infected varmint that was trying to accost him and his daughter while they were kayaking in Pennsylvania, CBS reported.
When this failed, he resorted to punching, kicking and whaling on the “big a– crazy beaver” with rocks, finally managing to dispatch the dogged log-gobbler with a stick.
“I’m just glad it didn’t bite either of us,” he said. Anyone bitten or exposed to a suspected rabid animal should seek medical attention ASP so they can administer post-exposure prophylaxis.
A dam shame
In general, these buck-toothed mammals have more to fear from people, who hunted the North American beaver population nearly to extinction by 1850 to fuel the European fur trade.
“Virtually all the beavers in North America over a two- or 300-year period were killed by the hundreds of millions to make decorative hats for Europeans,” lamented Lisle.
While trapping for fur went out of fashion when the hats did, thousands of beavers are still killed each year due to damage caused when they fell trees or build dams that flood roads.
Meanwhile, despite spending his “whole life in beaver-created wetlands,” Lisle has “never had one hostile interaction with a beaver.”
Read the full article here
