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Mere days before playing host to the visiting Canadian prime minister, Argentina announced that it is launching a merciless war of extermination on Canada’s most recognizable symbol.

Early this week, Argentina announced that, in partnership with Chile, it will be dispatching a crack team of 10 hunters into the wilds around Tierra Del Fuego, at the rugged southern tip of South America.

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Equipped with helicopters, cold weather gear and training to survive extended periods in hostile terrain, their decade-long mission is to trap and destroy 100,000 Canadian beavers.

“There are one or two beaver colonies per kilometre of river. We want to get these animals as fast as possible,” Argentine invasive species biologist Adrian Schiavini was quoted as saying in the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

The animals are all descendants of a group of 20 to 50 Canadian beavers first released onto Argentina’s southernmost island in 1946. The idea, hatched under the reign of strongman Juan Perón, was to fill southern forests with beavers in order to boost the Argentine fur economy.