14 DAY TRIAL // A 52-year-old man was recently attacked and chased down the street by a beaver in the small city of Miramichi, on the west coast of Canada, Metro informs.
Terry Furlotte, the victim, says he was visiting family in Miramichi, New Brunswick, on Tuesday afternoon, when he saw a beaver walking in the street. People started to gather at the site and traffic was halted because of the unusual sighting on the city's roads.
“There I see the beaver going down the pavement. I found it odd that he was just walking downtown here. He was on a stroll down King St.,” Furlotte said, according to The Hamilton Spectator.
Obviously, the animal caught the man's attention and he approached it to get a closer look. But when he tried to snap a photo of it with his cellphone, the beaver became aggressive and attacked him.
“He slapped his tail, turned around with a big old hiss, you could see his teeth there sticking out. I had to turn and run away. He chased me down the road,” Mr. Furlotte said, adding that the animal was about two feet long (60 cm) and one foot (30 cm) around.
People got so scared when the beaver began acting widely that they called the police. When officers arrived at the scene, they cordoned off the road to avoid hitting the rodent and allow it to get back into the wilderness.
Peter Richardson, the animal control officer for the city, says many beavers live in the area and around this time of the year, young specimen are often driven out of their dams by parents to make way for a new litter. That could explain the fact that the rodent was wandering around the town.
Richardson also said that the animal's behavior was not abnormal, given that a large number of people were staring at it. He assumes the beaver would have felt threatened by the curious crowd.
“The only thing it knows to do is either run or stand its ground. It was just protecting itself,” he explained.
Beavers are the second-largest rodent in the world after the capybara, and are known for their natural trait of building dams on rivers and streams to install their homes in the resulting pond. Although beaver attacks are rare, experts say they can turn against humans if they are rabid or feel threatened, but fatal cases are almost unheard of.