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Man recovers after beaver attack while swimming in lake
Anchor/Reporter
A Vermont man is recovering after he was attacked by a beaver while swimming in Lake George in New York.
Brandon Shortsleeve was in the water with his brother and a friend when the beaver started attacking his friend.
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“The first time my friend ended up picking it up, it swam back at him, so we were like, OK, it’s just out for blood,” Shortsleeve said.
They had just gotten into the water off Turtle Island on the Fourth of July when it happened.
“We were in the water, I think, for maybe five minutes before my friend started freaking out and screaming. He said something attacked him,” Shortsleeve said. “I just jumped in the water, and then I grabbed whatever it was attacking and pulled it out.”
It was a young beaver, probably rabid, according to health experts. Shortsleeve said he has never seen a beaver behave like that before.
“I was a little freaked out. I didn’t think it was a beaver at first. I just grabbed this little brown blob in the water. I saw its teeth and its tail, and I was like, OK, this is a beaver. It ended up biting me a few times as I got it out of the water,” he said. “I’ve got to keep a good grip on this thing, then I just tossed him pretty far.”
Shortsleeve said after the beaver swam off, he started getting people out of the water.
Now the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is asking visitors to Turtle Island to be cautious.
Beavers are typically afraid of humans, but officials say one with rabies may lose that fear.
“They’re afraid of us. They don’t want to interact with us. They’re not particularly curious about us. A normal beaver, if you’re boating along or kayaking along, if a beaver sees you, they will slap the water with their giant tails, and they’ll swim away,” said Jackie Lendrum, the DEC Fish and Wildlife Division director. “If you see a beaver approaching you, whether you’re swimming or boating, that would be considered abnormal beaver behavior.”
While beavers can get rabies from other animals, it’s very rare for them to pass it along to the rest of the colony.
“Beavers would typically be mostly a dead-end host. The virus isn’t well adapted to that particular animal,” the DEC Wildlife Health Program leader, Kevin Hynes, said. “It may bite another beaver and give another beaver rabies, but in all likelihood, it probably wouldn’t.”
Even after this ordeal, Shortsleeve said he’s not afraid of the animal and recognizes how unusual this is.
“I was told that I have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than that ever happening again,” he said.
Shortsleeve and his friend are doing OK. They’re going through the rabies shot cycle.
It would be nearly impossible for the DEC to trap a specific beaver, but they are patrolling the area. Anyone who sees anything suspicious should call them.
Currently, there have been no other reports of aggressive beavers in the area.
