A beaver has bitten a man in Belarus, severing an important artery on his thigh and causing him to bleed to death.
The rare incident occurred when the 60-year-old man, who was on a fishing trip, stopped to take a photo of the beaver, Sky News reports. The man reached medics in 30 minutes but was pronounced dead once he arrived. Sergei Shilinchuk, deputy head of the environmental protection committee for the city of Brest, said that he had never heard of someone dying after an encounter with a beaver in the area.
"People have lost fingers — that's the worst I've come across," Shilinchuk told The Telegraph. "The beaver is not normally aggressive, but it does have big teeth and immensely powerful jaws; it can cut down a tree three feet wide."
The femoral artery is the main corridor for nutrients and oxygen to travel to the lower extremities. A person can bleed to death within 10 to 15 minutes of sustaining damage to the artery, according to Wise Geek.
"Whenever this artery is injured, it becomes a life and death situation," the website states.
Despite their strong jaws, beavers are mostly harmless and it is rare for one to attack a human. They are generally herbivores that subsist on twigs, bark, leaves, roots and aquatic plants. According to Shilinchuk, it is possible that this particular beaver was rabid or trying to claim new territory.
In Belarus, the beaver population is growing quickly, having doubled over the course of the past five years in the Brest region. Currently as many as 80,000 beavers are thought to exist in the country and a drop in demand for beaver fur has only exacerbated the problem of continued beaver population growth.
"We're making efforts to stimulate commercial use of beaver meat but that hasn't taken off yet," Shilinchuk said.
Accordingly, more and more beavers are being spotted in populated areas in the region.
The attack in Belarus is not the only recent incident of beaver aggression. A video released not long ago shows one of the animals attacking a man in Russia. In 2012, several incidents were reported in which beavers attacked humans, including two in Fairfax County, Va. over the course of one week.
