Schwerin (dpa/mv) - In the future, 50 new graduates of special beaver training courses will find solutions to conflicts between beavers and people in the north-east. The Schwerin Environment Minister Till Backhaus (SPD) congratulated the participants on Monday for successfully completing the training.
Beaver dams and the digging of burrows regularly led to conflicts at ditches, dykes or road and railway embankments, the ministry said in a statement. According to the 2020 Beaver Ordinance, the now trained experts can help resolve conflicts with the strictly protected species. They are mainly active in the regional water and soil associations, but also in the state offices for agriculture and the environment, in the nature parks, at Deutsche Bahn AG and at the federal forestry company or the armed forces.
The graduates should act as contact persons for those affected. The state government assumes that almost half of the beaver-related conflicts can be dealt with more quickly and with less bureaucracy in the future. According to the Beaver Ordinance, only trained personnel may remove uninhabited beaver burrows or beaver dams that deliberately disturb or even kill the animals.
The return of the formerly disappeared species to the cultivated landscape of the north-east poses problems for farmers, for example, because they flood fields. The training had been postponed several times due to the corona virus.
