Just in time for TRUDEAU’S visit, Argentina declares WAR on the Canadian BEAVER

MISSION TO TRAP AND DESTROY 100,000 PROBLEMATIC RODENTS

Mere days before playing host to the visiting Canadian prime minister, Argentina announced that it is launching a merciless war of extermination on Canada’s most recognizable symbol.

Early this week, Argentina announced that, in partnership with Chile, it will be dispatching a crack team of 10 hunters into the wilds around Tierra Del Fuego, at the rugged southern tip of South America.

Equipped with helicopters, cold weather gear and training to survive extended periods in hostile terrain, their decade-long mission is to trap and destroy 100,000 Canadian beavers.

“There are one or two beaver colonies per kilometre of river. We want to get these animals as fast as possible,” Argentine invasive species biologist Adrian Schiavini was quoted as saying in the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

The animals are all descendants of a group of 20 to 50 Canadian beavers first released onto Argentina’s southernmost island in 1946. The idea, hatched under the reign of strongman Juan Peron, was to fill southern forests with beavers in order to boost the Argentine fur economy.

But with no natural predators, the rodents soon thrived with an intensity that they had never known in their native land. (In Canada, beaver populations are kept in check by a variety of sharp-toothed carnivores including lynx and wolverines.)

The animals colonized every environment they could find, from peat bogs to steppe to grasslands. They were in Chilean territory by the 1960s, and by the 1990s horrified authorities were noting that the beavers had crossed to the South American mainland. Beavers now occupy a piece of South America the size of New Brunswick.

The invasion is similar to the introduction of rabbits to Australia beginning in the 19th century. The rodents soon became so ubiquitous that they were doing severe damage to agriculture, wiping out native species and causing irreversible erosion.

But beavers are a particularly destructive species of rodent. They don’t just eat everything in sight; they flood it, too.

In one particularly well-circulated quote, the Argentine naturalist Claudio Bertonatti compared Tierra del Fuego’s beaver-ravaged areas to the bombed-out forests of Poland after the Second World War.

“What had happened? Beavers, that’s what had happened,” he told the 2015 documentary Beavers: Invaders of the End of the World.

With beaver dams now peppering the landscape, trout migration has been thrown into disarray and land animals are forced to navigate former river deltas transformed into stagnant bogs.

While North American forests have evolved to bounce back from the occasional round of beaver-gnawing, South American trees are uniquely vulnerable to the 30-kilogram rodents. In only a matter of hours, a single beaver can take down a tree that’s been growing since the 1860s.

Humans have felt the brunt of the invasion as well. Ski resorts have lost bridges to beaver-related flooding. Roads have been washed out. And if drinking water wasn’t already contaminated by hectares of beaver-created stagnant pools, it’s not helped by the rodent’s urine and feces.

South America’s war on the beaver is not new. In 2006, the province of Tierra del Fuego issued a declaration dubbing the beaver a “harmful and damaging species.”

Two years later, Chile and Argentina signed a bilateral agreement to eradicate the rodents together. Or, as they called the plan, the “restoration of southern ecosystems affected by the invasion of North American beaver.”

But initial efforts to curb beaver numbers by way of a tail bounty failed. Locals only hunted on their off hours and they primarily targeted animals near the roads — rather than venturing into the deep wilderness where the beavers could be hit hardest.

“No one got into the woods and walked three days through the cold,” Erio Curto, the director of protected areas for Tierra del Fuego, told the Clarin.com.

Now, with the supervision of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, Argentina is debuting what they hope will be their final showdown with the beavers: recruiting a team of professional hunters who can withstand cold, isolation — and would stay until every beaver was gone.

The cull is not expected to be complete until 2031.

The standard method of dispatch will be to trap the animals and kill them with a blow to the head. Authorities quoted by Argentine media said they examined no-kill options such as sterilization, but that the problem is too large for anything other than a lethal eradication of the rodent.

A 2010 feasibility study for South American beaver eradication noted that it was a “novel and ambitious project” with no guarantees of success. However, if beavers could indeed be banished from the continent, the paper noted it could signal a new era in the “management of other global threats to biodiversity.”

On Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will touch down in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires following a visit to Cuba. Trudeau is scheduled to meet with President Mauricio Macri. Their conversation is not expected to include beavers.