December 23, 2025
by Dr. Fran Santiago-Ávila
WW1 Science and Advocacy Director
When I sat down to write about beavers, I went looking for online footage that would reveal the intimate life of beavers—to remind me of who beavers actually are and, therefore, how we should relate to them.
I kept returning to some of the wonderful online footage of beaver families: parents, older siblings, and kits sharing a house they built together, making choices every day about where to live, how to shape water, and how to keep one another safe. It was immediately clear that these are not just “furbearers”—they are thoughtful, hard-working animals with projects, relationships, and traditions of their own.
As expected from family-living mammals, beavers are also very social and playful, and cherish their family bonds. Beaver parents play with their kits, but also teach them the critical crafts of tree-felling and dam-building. When the kits are grown, parents may even give them a choice between striking out on their own in search of mates or, if resources allow, staying at home to help raise new brothers and sisters.
Simply by living their lives, beavers transform harsh landscapes into havens for life. Their dams slow water, spread it across floodplains, and push it into the ground. Ponds and side channels appear, sediment settles, soils deepen, and over time, valleys become wet meadows full of life.
Countless beings depend on beavers to thrive and survive. Beaver wetlands are refuges from drought, heat, and fire; havens that stay green, wet, and cool even when everything around them is brown, dry, and hot. Amphibians, reptiles, and insects flourish in these wetlands; songbirds, waterfowl, otters, deer, and elk live in the habitat mosaics around beaver ponds and meadows; and deep, cool beaver ponds are ideal nurseries for salmon and trout.
Without committee meetings, controversy, or budget debates, beavers build the climate resilience our world desperately needs: they cool temperatures, clean water, sequester carbon, alleviate droughts, reduce flooding, store groundwater, and create natural fire breaks.
Humans are a primary beneficiary of this “ecosystem engineering” that is part of a beaver’s daily life. Beavers do for free what we would spend millions trying ineffectively to recreate. But instead of reciprocity, respect, and protection, we reward beavers with dismissal, persecution, and death.
Washington’s Beaver Policies
In Washington, beavers are classified as “furbearers,” named and valued only for the hats and coats that can be made from their skins. In practice, the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife (WDFW) allows:
- Unlimited “recreational” trapping from November 1 to March 31, with no limit on the number of beavers a trapper can “harvest” for their “hides and pelts”, although a 2000 voter initiative banned “body-gripping traps,” including leghold traps and neck snares. Instead, trappers use cage traps set to catch beavers and hold them underwater until they drown. Because beavers are adapted to survive for long periods underwater, this can take as long as 35 minutes.
- Year-round killing due to “conflicts.” Landowners, their employees, and wildlife control operators can trap and kill “nuisance” beavers year-round without permits, reporting requirements, or limits.
It is impossible to estimate the number of beavers killed in Washington each year, since landowners do not have to report beavers they kill, and trapper reporting rates for the past decade have averaged only ~51%. Even with these considerable gaps, however, state data reflects that humans kill roughly two thousand beavers each year. The real number is likely much higher.
In late 2024, WDFW took a small but positive step on beaver policy by making its beaver relocation pilot effort into a permanent program, allowing trained permittees to save some “nuisance” beavers by moving them to sites where more beavers are needed. But this program relocates only a tiny number of beavers each year, leaving in place the underlying framework based on lethal control.
As with most animals, relocation is traumatic for beavers, often separating families and leaving them struggling to survive in unfamiliar territory. Nationwide statistics indicate that less than 50% of relocated beavers survive. Nonprofit organizations that relocate beavers strive to minimize this trauma, but would be the first to admit that relocation should be a last resort, when death is the only other option.
And these efforts to maximize the survival of relocated beavers might all be in vain, because there are no state protections for relocated beavers. If they later come into conflict, they can be killed like any other “nuisance” animal. Even worse, members of the public can trap and kill them in unlimited numbers as “recreation.”
WDFW Must Pave a Path for Beaver Coexistence
Washington needs a comprehensive beaver coexistence plan that:
- Recognizes beavers as keystone species and climate allies.
- Respects beavers’ well-being, agency, and autonomy, alongside the ecological benefits they provide.
- Promotes and prioritizes coexistence tools with proven success at alleviating problems caused by beavers (tree cages, culvert extenders, and flow devices such as “beaver deceivers”), providing access to education, technical assistance, and site design.
- Requires landowners and trappers to report every beaver killed, with consequences for noncompliance.
- Treats invasive and harmful interventions like relocation and lethal control as a true last resort, available only under limited circumstances, after coexistence tools have failed to resolve the conflict.
- Strives to maximize the success of relocations and provides meaningful protections for relocated beavers.
But WDFW continues to resist this approach. As we explained in our comments, WDFW’s draft Game Management Plan (GMP) continues to sanction unlimited “recreational” beaver trapping despite weak demographic data, considerable reporting gaps, no spatial safeguards to prevent local extirpation, and no serious analysis of how killing beavers affects water, wetlands, salmon, or other wildlife. It treats beavers as “furbearers” to be used for human amusement and fashion, not as beings whose work underpins entire communities of life.
Meanwhile, in WDFW’s draft State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP)—the state’s “comprehensive plan for conserving the state’s fish and wildlife and the natural habitats on which they depend”—beavers appear only as a “Species of Greatest Information Need.” That label may justify research into their population status and distribution, but it does not provide protections or prioritize conservation actions. At the same time, the draft SWAP omits beavers from sections where they clearly belong: as natural habitat builders for a multitude of Species and Habitats of Greatest Conservation Need. It thus fails to recognize the important role beavers play in conservation, even though so many vulnerable species depend on the worlds they create.
Meanwhile, WDFW has been leading a multi-stakeholder effort to develop Beaver Habitat Management Guidelines, intended to describe beavers’ role in restoration and recommend best practices for coexistence and maintaining or restoring their presence. These guidelines were expected by mid-2025 and are significantly delayed. Done well, they could begin to correct course. Done poorly, as with the SWAP and GMP, they will be yet another missed opportunity for responsible beaver policy.
Not scientific. Not ethical. Not Washington.
Our polling shows that only 12% of Washingtonians agree with WDFW’s policy toward beavers, with more than half believing we should actively protect them from all human mortality. The current regime of unlimited trapping, unregulated killing, inadequate data, and a failure to recognize the ecological importance of beavers ultimately benefits no one. It merely caters to the demands of a tiny minority of traditional WDFW “stakeholders,” at the expense of the many beings, human and nonhuman, who would benefit from a more ethical, science-informed coexistence plan.
Simply put, the way WDFW treats beavers is:
- Not scientific: WDFW kills thousands of beavers with poor data on their populations or mortality rates, ignores their role in hydrology, biodiversity, and climate resilience, and refuses to recognize their ecological importance.
- Not ethical: WDFW values beavers only for their fur and the “recreation” they offer to people who enjoy trapping and killing them. It treats them as disposable, allowing landowners to kill them to alleviate nuisances that could be easily solved by other means. It offers no recognition or reciprocity for the benefits they provide us and a host of other beings.
- Not Washington. WDFW’s policy ignores the values, preferences, and needs of Washingtonians, catering instead to small special interest groups that have historically controlled wildlife policy.
That is Not My WDFW. Is it yours?