“The trapping has concluded,” Kelly McFalls, a city spokeswoman, said in an e-mail Thursday. “Upon removal of the beavers and aided by a stretch of dry weather, the city has incrementally breached the dams to allow the water to resume its intended course. The potential for the impacted roads to collapse and subsequent flooding is now slowly subsiding.”

City officials confirmed that lethal traps were used to kill beavers in two locations where beaver dams were causing problems.

Framingham’s war on beavers has come to an end.

When asked how many beavers died in the traps, McFalls said she didn’t have a total.


“The city of Framingham regrets that it was placed into a set of circumstances that resulted in the demise of the beavers; however, under the prevailing emergency circumstances, few other practical options were available,” she said.

Framingham’s public works department hired a professional trapper to eradicate the beavers from two specific locations. One area was Singletary Lane, because water was flooding the roadway and freezing over, which resulted in black ice and created a dangerous situation for school bus drivers, according to Framingham conservation administrator Robert McArthur.

The second location was a dam on Baiting Brook that caused flooding “to the point where it was infiltrating a city sewer line” that runs parallel to Temple Street, McArthur said.

“Both issues were considered a threat to public health and safety,” said McArthur, who noted that relocating the beavers was not an option because it’s against the law.

But the decision to use lethal traps to kill the beavers was criticized by some residents and animal rights groups.

The Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had urged Framingham officials to use nonlethal devices to address the city’s issues with beavers.

“For decades, we’ve encouraged the use of alternatives to trapping for beaver-related conflicts,” said Kara Holmquist, director of advocacy at the MSPCA-Angell. “Fortunately, these alternatives — including waterflow devices and culvert protectors — are humane, cost-effective, and last up to a decade. Trapping simply leaves a vacancy for other beavers to move in. It’s not an effective or long-term strategy.”


Framingham’s move to kill the beavers was also criticized by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights organization based in Norfolk, Va.

“A slow death by drowning in an underwater trap is a terrifying and painful ordeal for any animal, and beavers take more than 15 minutes just to lose consciousness,” said PETA senior director Stephanie Bell. “Their orphaned young will starve, and survivors will keep breeding. Newcomers are inevitable so long as the area attracts them, leading to an endless killing cycle at the taxpayers’ expense.”

Bell, who described Framingham’s strategy as “cruel and foolish,” said PETA had “urged the city to abandon this plan in favor of using beaver repellents, gnaw-proof tree trunk cages, flood-preventing pipe devices, and other humane deterrents that will be effective over the long term.”

Skip Lisle, a wildlife biologist from Vermont who invented the Beaver Deceiver, a type of flow device that’s designed to prevent beavers from building unwanted dams and clogging up culverts, said beavers do not need to be killed to address damming and flooding issues. In fact, that strategy will backfire, he said.

Killing beavers “is a guarantee that you’ll never solve the problem,” Lisle said. “The first new beaver that comes along will clog the culvert again. You’ll never solve the problem.”


Beavers are constantly searching the landscape for good damming sites, and any unoccupied territory that’s suitable for dam-building is considered prime real estate, he said. “A culvert is a beaver magnet,” he said.

Lisle said it’s possible to “beaver-proof” an area without harming animals, he said.

“You don’t have to kill the beavers first,” he said.

Lisle said the cost of installing a Beaver Deceiver can vary depending on the location, but the ballpark estimate he gives is about $2,500 per culvert. The work can usually be completed in a day or two, he said.

In a statement released on Thursday, the city of Framingham defended its actions and said “the city acted to prevent a potential public safety and public health disaster.”

“The city spent the last five weeks working to keep a section of Singletary Lane, which includes a 100-year-old land bridge, from washing out,” the statement said. “If the bridge had eroded away it would have taken the embedded water, sewer, and natural gas lines with it, creating an extreme hardship for nearly 300 homes in Framingham.”

Singletary Lane had to be closed multiple times while the city ran pumps to lower the water levels, and the city spent nearly $40,000 in the recent weeks in pumping costs and traffic details to retain the bridge and keep the road open, the statement said.


“In the past, the city had utilized a device commonly referred to as a ‘Beaver Deceiver’ at beaver dams to manage water levels where the prevailing conditions allowed for it,” the statement said. “At this point in the flooding, and due to the extreme elevation of the water, it was too late to implement that option.”

Emily Sweeney can be reached at esweeney@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @emilysweeney.