By Daily Caller (World News) | Created at 2024-09-26 19:00:57 | Updated at 2024-09-30 05:28:29
3 days ago
September 26, 2024 1:50 PM ET
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk blamed recent devastating floods across Poland and the rest of Central Europe on beavers and gave residents the green light to do something about it, according to reports.
The floods were central Europe’s worst in at least 20 years, Reuters reported, and at least 23 people reportedly have died — seven of them in Poland.
“Your suggestions are not the first that rapid changes are needed when it comes to the presence of beavers on the embankments,” a translation of Tusk’s remarks at a crisis management team meeting in Głogów reads, the Gazeta Wyborcza Wrocław reported. “We made decisions in 2010, ecologists were upset but there are priorities. Sometimes you have to choose between love for animals and the safety of towns, villages and the stability of the embankments.”
Tusk told residents to do what they had to do within the law and that he’d defend their decisions.
“If there is a need for legislation, we will deal with it in a week,” he said. (RELATED: Videos Show Brutal Aftermath Of 2024’s First US Hurricane, Leaving Eight Dead)
Dr. Andrzej Czech, an expert on beavers and an environmental adviser to the Polish government, told POLITICO hunters and farmers hold sway in the agrarian-conservative Polish People’s Party (PSL), one of Tusk’s coalition partners. Hunters are seeking the chance to quickly hunt down beavers get paid for it, while the average person would be pleased with the quick solution.
Beavers can sometimes flood farms, but Czech said it’s a small percentage.
Czech told Wyborcza that Tusk‘s claims about beavers causing the floods were “a pyramid-like nonsense made up on the spot.” Beavers helped amass about seven billion cubic feet of water in places in Poland that need it the most. Plans to kill beavers would be “idiocy,” he added.
Building embankments 40-odd feet away from rivers or reinforcing embankments with iron meshes would help, Czech recommended.
Poland’s beaver population reached almost 137,000 in 2019, according to a 2022 study. Regulated hunting could help control the population, the authors recommended.
German wildlife manager Gerhard Schwab also objected to killing beavers. He did say, though, that beavers could indeed damage dikes, POLITICO reported.
Schwab recommended protecting the dikes’ surfaces with mesh wires and building new dikes using gravel to prevent beavers from digging into them.
The floods have destroyed property and infrastructure across Romania, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Czechia.
