GROVE CITY

Angry beaver lodges teeth in 14-year-old

Sept. 1 was one of those sweltering summer days when nothing feels better than to spend the afternoon splashing around in some cool water.

Andrew Shoop, 14, and his friends, Ryan Wigton and Mike Best, all of Grove City, decided to take their dogs and spend their last Friday before school resumed at their favorite swimming hole in Wolf Creek, behind the Cooper Cameron ballfields.

But the day didn’t turn out as planned.

The boys had been swimming for about an hour. Andrew, the farthest from shore, but still only in water a few feet deep, felt something on his right calf.

"It took me a couple of seconds to realize it was biting me," Andrew said. "I reached down and felt fur, and I assumed it was one of my friends’ dogs. I started saying, ‘Help! Odie is attacking me!’ "

Andrew said his friends thought he was joking.

"After I tried getting them to help me, I reached down and managed to almost tear it off my calf," he said. "I was still touching it, and it came up and got my inner left thigh, real high up in the groin area."

Andrew still thought it was a dog that was attacking him.

"I started to kick my way into shore with my right leg," he said. "I got most of my body out of the water.

"I realized it was a beaver and was pretty much just focusing on its upper body. My friends saw its tail flapping up and down. I started punching it on the head to get it off of me."

Andrew estimates he hit the beaver 25 to 30 times before it let go and swam away.

"My friends were in shock. They didn’t really know what to do. I got out on shore and looked down and saw the blood streaming out of the bite on my right calf," Andrew said. "I ran up the hill to where our fire pit is, and I was starting to hyperventilate.

"My friend (Ryan) took off his shirt and told me to wrap it around above the bite to stop it from bleeding."

Andrew did that and the bleeding lessened. He and Ryan grabbed their dogs and headed out of the woods on the ¾-mile walk to the road to get help. Mike stayed behind to gather their belongings.

Andrew said they were heading toward a friend’s house near the ballfields. As they reached the edge of the ballfields, a car pulled in.

Inside the car, Dan and Melanie Ritenour were going to the ballfields to check out some work Ritenour was planning to do the next day when the boys flagged them down.

"He told me he had been bitten by a beaver, and I thought he was nuts," said Ritenour, "Then I saw his leg.

"He looked pretty bad, and he said he needed to get home to call his dad. He was shaky, and he wasn’t talking normally -- he was very excited."

Ritenour told him he wasn’t going home; he was going to the hospital.

Ritenour said Andrew wasn’t crying at that point, "but I think he started to break down a little once he was in the car and knew he was getting help.

"He was a real nice kid," Ritenour said. "He tried to put his shirt down to protect the car seat. He just wanted to get to his house to call his dad.

"I don’t think he could have made it much farther," Ritenour added. "He was still in the ballfields area and had about 150 yards or so to go before he got to (state Route) 208, then a few more blocks to his house on Lincoln Avenue.

"We’re happy that we saw him and were able to do something."

Andrew said the surgeon who saw him at nearby United Community Hospital, Pine Township, thought it was better if he was sent to Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh.

Andrew said he was attacked at about 12:30 p.m., and he arrived at Children’s Hospital at about 1:30 or 2 p.m. For the next six hours or so, Andrew said, doctor after doctor came into his room to try to figure out how to treat his wounds; nobody had ever heard of a beaver attacking a human.

The boy’s mother, Patricia Shoop, said the doctors at Children’s got on the Internet to try to find information about beaver bites.

"There is no documented case of a beaver ever attacking a human," she said.

Andrew said the bite wounds were on his right calf and his inner left thigh, but he had deep gashes on his right thigh from the beaver’s claws.

Mrs. Shoop said her son described his calf wound as "looking like his leg had Play-Doh hanging off of it." She said the gashes from the beaver’s claws looked like the pictures you see of people who have been attacked by a shark.

Dr. Barbara Gaines at Children’s said Andrew was in stable condition but was a little bit frightened when she first saw him.

"He was lucky -- he had no nerve or muscle damage, and no broken bones."

"They stitched it loosely, and put in tubes to drain the wounds," Mrs. Shoop said. "He picked up a lot of bacteria from the beaver, the stagnant water in the creek and from the woods."

Dr. Gaines said there will be some definite scars, but she doesn’t think he’ll need plastic surgery. He did need rabies shots.

"Andrew wants to be a game warden," said Mrs. Shoop, "and I asked him if he had changed his mind. He told me, ‘Just because something happened, it doesn’t mean you should stop doing what you want to do.’ "

But Andrew doesn’t think he wants to swim in the creek again.

"I’ll still go in the woods. We have a fire pit, and we’re fixing up an old cabin," he said.

His parents are not putting any new restrictions on him about the creek.

"You have to put it in perspective. It’s never happened before, and it probably will never happen again," Mrs. Shoop said. "I hate to say, ‘You can’t.’ If you were in a car accident, you’d never get in a car again.

"Andrew likes to swim in the swimming hole. He and his buddies did it all summer long. I bought him a pool pass and he only used it once. He loves wildlife. He’s in the woods all of the time. It was a big thrill for Andrew when the game warden came to the house."