UnNews:Really Big Beaver On The Loose

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

31 December 2008

This photograph, taken in a Devon car-park, is believed to show the really big beaver and proves that it is, in fact, really big.

Devon, England -- Trees throughout south-west England are worried today as news broke that a really big beaver is running amok in the countryside. The animal is believed to weigh around 3000lb (1360kg) and is known to have already felled several trees since escaping from Upcott Grange Farm near Lifton.

The beaver is male and absconded at night in October along with two female beavers. The females were quickly captured after being spotted in a nearby shoe shop, but the male is thought to now be somewhere in the River Tamar, twenty miles away. Farmer and conservationist Derek Gow told reporters that it is likely the beaver is searching for a mate. Upcott Grange Farm is home to 23 other beavers, whereas wild beavers have been extinct in Great Britain since the 16th Century, leading many to conclude that the beaver is a; not very intelligent and b; likely to resort to self-pleasure.

Honeytraps, baited with the scent of female beaver, have been set up along the riverbanks but have so far only succeeded in capturing a number of fourteen-year-old boys and a middle-aged man in a dirty raincoat.

The beavers are kept in the farm by means of an electric fence which had malfunctioned due to flooding, but Farmer Gow is puzzled as to how they escaped as the fencing has no holes and there is no sign of beaver-related earthworks underneath it. "I can only assume they became so wet during the flood that they were sufficiently lubricated as to be able to escape through the fencing," he said.

Sessile Oak, a spokeman for the British Union of Trees, said, "This is without doubt the most worrying news for British trees since the outbreak of Dutch Elm Disease in the 1960s."