Vegetables Gardening - Growing Organic Vegetables

Does anyone have any remedies for deterring beavers without killing them?

We have about two dozen fruit trees. About the first of July, I went out
one morning and discovered that one of our peach trees was completely gone.
All that was left was about 18" of the trunk. There were not any branches on
the ground or any signs of it being cut by a saw. At first I thought someone
was in our garden and I was ready to put in a fence immediately. The cut
was fairly smooth with a little bit of grooves in it. A few days later,
the same scenario happened again. We were completely stumped. Living in
South Carolina, I didn't believe there were beavers here but the thought
crossed our minds. Our property borders a neighbor's 5 acre pond and two
smaller ponds and then a creek in the woods on the other side. Two weeks
later, the third or our five peach trees suffered the same fate. Now we
have lost all five peach trees, one nectarine and two plumb trees. We have
a total of about 24 trees and they are about six years old so just producing
for us!

We talked to one of our neighbors that has a pond and he said on the other
side of the 5 acre pond at the spillway, they have discovered beavers
building a home. They are trying to get rid of them. That pond borders
our property but the beavers have to come a long way across the pond, out of
the woods, and under a fence to get to our garden and then the trees.

As I called around farm and garden centers, etc. the most popular solution
was a rifle. One guy told me to open two cans of sardines and place them at
the edge of the pond and then get a lawn chair and sit with a shotgun on our
laps and wait for them to come for the sardines and shoot away! I hate to
do that and on top of it, we have never seen them in our yard. We go out at
dusk and at night trying to catch them but they don't come daily and we've
only seen the devastation.

HELP!!!!

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