DAM IF YOU DO, DAM IF YOU DON’T

The State of Michigan versus Beavers

If you’re a homeowner, having a river or pond run through your property can be pretty cool. It can turn a rather nondescript piece of land into something more interesting and, with proper upkeep and safety, more fun. This is, of course, only true if the water was something you expected to be there. If, however, one day you wake up to find your typically dry backyard more akin to a bayou, that’s a problem.

In 1997, when a homeowner in Montcalm County, Michigan, discovered unexpected water on his property, he went investigating. What—rather, who—he found was his neighbor Ryan DeVries. According to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), DeVries had unlawfully diverted a waterway, causing flooding downstream. Specifically, the DEQ believed that DeVries had started to build wooden dams on a stream without a permit. The DEQ wrote him a letter, which outlined his allegedly unlawful activity and stated the fine of $10,000 per day for said crime.

However, there was a problem with this letter: Neither DeVries nor the man who owned the house he lived in, Stephen Tvedten, had built the dams. They were built by beavers. Tvedten decided to have fun with the DEQ, and wrote back: “A couple of beavers are in the (State unauthorized) process of constructing and maintaining two wood ‘debris’ dams across the outlet stream of my Spring Pond. While I did not pay for, nor authorize, their dam project, I think they would be highly offended you call their skillful use of natural building materials ‘debris.’…I can safely state there is no dam way you could ever match their dam skills, their dam resourcefulness, their dam ingenuity, their dam persistence, their dam determination and/or their dam work ethic.” The letter went on to defend the beavers’ right to “dam legal representation.”

The DEQ didn’t find the response so funny. Instead, the agency doubled down, claiming they were fully aware the debris were beaver dams; the issue was that the beavers who built the dams had abandoned them long ago, but Mr. Tvedten had continued to maintain the dams. Tvedten countered by alleging that the reason the beavers had left the site was that the neighbor who was complaining about the flooding had killed them.

Regardless of what happened to the beavers, it was clear that Tvedten had probably not been maintaining their dams. And it was also clear that the absentee beavers were unlikely to reply to the DEQ’s letter or apply for a permit. The DEQ dropped the investigation a few weeks later.

BONUS FACT

Beavers are mammals and are in the order Rodentia (as in “rodent”). Despite the fact that they’re attracted to water and can swim pretty well, they’re cousins of rats and mice—and are definitely not fish. But in the seventeenth century, when Europeans first came to the New World, this detail hardly mattered. According to an article in Scientific American, the Bishop of Quebec classified beavers as a fish, based on their habitat. As a result, “the general prohibition on the consumption of meat on Fridays did not apply to beaver meat.”