Attack of the bolshy beaver (it was dam annoyed after being called a platypus!)
Facing the furry fury of roadside rodent
WILDLIFE experts yesterday issued a safety warning after a chef was attacked by a wild beaver.
Ross Smith was on a country drive with friends when they spotted a mysterious brown creature on the grass verge.
When the 20-year-old got out of the car and went to investigate, the animal turned nasty and leapt at him, snarling.
The 3ft-long beaver is believed to be one of a colony of the animals living wild in Lintrathen Loch, near Kirriemuir in Angus.
Extraordinary mobile phone camera footage of Mr Smith’s
‘It would chew your leg off’
encounter has now been posted on the internet, prompting a leading academic to warn the public not to approach the furry rodents.
Although it is not clear what provoked the beaver, one of Mr Smith’s friends can be heard asking: ‘Is that a platypus?’
Mr Smith, who works in a café in the Angus village of Edzell, was not hurt by the animal he spotted while on a country drive with his friends Shaun Kidd, also 20, and Reece Kettles, 22.
He said: ‘We had just come past Kinnordy and we saw this big sort of animal in the road. We thought it was a big cat or something so we got out and that’s when I started videoing. All of a sudden, Shaun was like, “It’s a platypus!” but we knew it was a beaver. He’s a wee bit simple sometimes.
‘It was big, about three and a half feet long. It was about 5560lb, you wouldn’t want to go up against it. I wouldn’t want to fight with it, not at all. It would chew your leg off.
‘I was trying to get closer to it and then it just started looking at me and growling and that was when it jumped.
‘It was making this sort of a hissy growl noise. It all happened pretty quickly. It was pretty scary.’
Mr Smith said the beaver did not appear unduly stressed by its brush with humanity: ‘It started keeping itself to itself again and just carried on walking down the side of the road.’
Although the encounter ended without injury, there could have been serious consequences. In 2013, a 60-year-old ex-serviceman in Belarus bled to death after a beaver bit through a main artery in his leg.
Beaver expert Dr Göran Hartman said: ‘All animals get scared when cornered and all animals with teeth will, in that situation, try to use them. Show the beaver some respect and keep a distance.’