The city of Irving wants to remove a family of beavers causing problems for one resident's landscape, while animal rights activists say the city should take other measures to address the issue.
Joseph Moses, assistant director of Parks and Recreation in Irving, said he received a call from a resident after a beaver ate their only tree on their front yard.
The resident lived across the street from Northwest Park. Moses said the city contracted a qualified trapper to remove the entire beaver family elsewhere.
"We relocate the entire family and we do it in the most humane way. And we relocate them to a safe haven where the beavers can live out their entire life with their families," Moses said.
The city hired Cliff Moore, owner of Animal Services Inc. Moore said he has worked for decades to remove and relocate animals across Dallas-Fort worth to safer havens.
"We are professional naturalists, using our skill to manage wildlife populations in balance with the available land and resources for the future of the animals," Moore said.
Moore said the beaver family was located in a location where it wasn't a good fit for the beavers.
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"This is not beaver habitat, there is no future for the baby beavers, that are going to be born every single year in a dedicated human environment," Moore said.
Moore is in the process of relocating the entire beaver family from Irving to a donated land in rural Collin County.
However, there are groups of people who are against the idea of removing animals at all.
Pylar Pinkston, founder of Furry Friendzy Animal Rescue and Wildlife Rehabilitation, is one of them.
"Leaving wildlife the way God created it is to me the most humane way," Pinkston said. "Our message would be, 'City of Irving, we know that there are other ways that you can handle this, and we would just respectfully request that you look at using the beaver paints so that there is a way to both save the trees, save wildlife, and be able to coexist.'"
Irving Resident Rhonda Thompson agreed. She started a campaign to collect signatures online for a petition against Irving's actions to trap the beavers. So far she's collected more than 800 signatures from people around the world.
"Beaver paint was applied to this tree, which is just a combination of sad and paint," Thompson said gesturing to a tree in the nearby city of Grand Prairie. "This is what we would like Irving to do. We don't need to remove these beavers, it's good for the ecosystem, it's a waste of tax dollars."
