Dan Wherley never thought of beavers as dangerous. Slow, harmless, busy building dams somewhere out of the way.
That opinion changed in about two seconds, when one leapt onto his kayak and tried to bite him.
He knocked it off with his oar, which should have ended it. Instead the animal turned and headed for his seven year old daughter, kayaking roughly 27 meters away.
Dan went into the water immediately, and the only question that mattered was whether he could cover that distance before it reached her.
He couldn’t.
The beaver got to her kayak first and climbed inside it.
Dan reached them and kicked the animal back into the water, and it simply came again. Then again. It kept lunging, refusing to break off no matter how many times he drove it away.
He grabbed his daughter and made for shore, with the beaver following them the whole way through the water.
Even reaching land didn’t stop it. Throwing rocks did nothing. In the end Dan had to strike it repeatedly with a stick before the attack finally ended.
Authorities later confirmed the animal had rabies.
To understand why it behaved that way, it helps to know what a beaver actually is when it stops being cautious.
An adult can weigh up to 30 kilograms and swim at 10 kilometers per hour. They aren’t predators in any conventional sense, but they are powerful and territorial, with front teeth built for serious work.
Those orange teeth are reinforced with iron, which is what lets them cut through wood. The same design works on flesh.
Attacks on people are rare. When they happen, rabies is usually the reason, because the disease turns normally wary animals into aggressive ones.
Rabies spreads through saliva and attacks the central nervous system, and once symptoms appear it is almost always fatal. That’s why even minor exposure demands immediate treatment.
Dan was never bitten. He received rabies shots anyway, as a precaution.
His case is unusual for how it ended rather than how it started, because there are other incidents that followed the same pattern.
In the summer of 2012, two sisters were swimming in Lake Anna in Virginia when they encountered a beaver underwater.
Eleven year old Alyssa felt something bump her leg and assumed another child was messing around. Then she noticed a dark shape moving beneath her, and by the time she understood what it was, the animal had bitten her upper thigh.
It didn’t stop with her. It went after her eight year old sister Annabella next, biting her leg as well.
Both girls went to hospital and received rabies treatment after the beaver was confirmed infected. Alyssa needed 15 stitches.
The worst documented case happened the same year, when a Boy Scout troop in New York was swimming in the Delaware River and a beaver attacked their leader.
It latched onto him and would not let go, biting his chest, arms, legs, and hands repeatedly while the group tried to intervene. The Scouts threw sticks and rocks at it. Nothing worked, and the attack only ended when the animal was killed.
He suffered more than a dozen bites and needed extensive medical treatment, including around 20 rabies shots. He made a full recovery. Which brings this back to a father in the water, swimming toward his daughter with an animal nobody considers dangerous already halfway there.
Beavers are harmless wildlife almost all of the time. Introduce rabies and that stops being true, and the people who find out tend to find out with no warning at all.
