Gia Woodworking | Custom Woodworking Projects | Ottawa, ON, Canada

I’m sure this question has been burning a hole through your brain since you first thought it up. Today this article shall put out that fire so you can get on with your life. In a purely hypothetical situation, let’s say you find a beaver. You train this beaver to target specific trees on properties in the area, cut them down and bring them back to you. Is this legal?

Now for legal reasons of our own, we must specify now that nothing in this article should be used as sound legal advice. We are not lawyers, we do not have it in us to read enough to become lawyers.

For the life of me, I have not found a single instance in which a beaver has been forced to show up to court in any capacity, let alone as a defendant, so we are off to an excellent start. The prosecution rate of beavers is a very low 0.0% and looking at this 10 year projection I have in front of me, it looks like it will stay that way. While it is true that no beaver to date has been taught to steal trees (that we know of) it’s hard to believe that the rules for beavers would all of a sudden change for your beaver friend. I mean, what police officer is going to want to try and wrangle a beaver into the back of a cop car? 

The next obstacle is a tricky one. While the beaver is unlikely to be arrested or charged for stealing, you could potentially be. The only way around this is to plead ignorance and deny that the beaver has been given formal training. You must also convince the police that you assumed the tree the beaver brought was actually already on your property and therefore, yours. If a beaver is to cut down a tree on someone else’s property and bring it to yours, it is still technically their tree. The best course of action (in this hypothetical situation) is to cut the tree up into whatever you wanted it for in the first place as soon as possible. It will be more difficult for people to find their missing tree if it is 200 coasters instead of 1 tree. 

In closing, if you manage to train a beaver to cut down trees and bring them to you, you may have found yourself a source of free lumber. Do not use this article as legal advice, this is purely hypothetical and doesn’t account for nuance in the law in different geographical locations.