Argentina Vs Beavers

It's on!

In 1946 someone thought it would be super-duper cute to put some Canadian beavers in Argentina's Tierra del Fuego National Park.

So Argentine officials put 25 of the happy little beavers in the park, and and for the past 60 years the tourists who flock to the southern tip of South America rejoice when they see the beavers busily building dams and gnawing through trees.

Lovely, except for one thing: the Argentine beaver population has now grown from 50 to 200,000.

It's virtual army that is chomping, cutting and flooding forests across this frosty, remote archipelago known as Tierra del Fuego, or Land of Fire. And the beavers are moving north, having swum across the turbulent, freezing waters of the Strait of Magellan.

Today, the rodents cause millions of dollars in damage, often to roads flooded by beaver dams.

Recently the government has been in talks about hiring professional sharpshooters to search and destroy every last one of them, perhaps even from helicopters.

This comes as a sad surprise to those of us that thought you could never have too much beaver.

[Image via AP Images.]

Tags: beavers, canadian, freezing, population, sad, south america, tourists