About six years ago, my wife and I purchased ten acres of farmland just outside of Ripon, California. Eight acres of the property are still orchard, while the front two acres serve as home to my wife and me, our two children, my father-in-law, and a varying number of gophers.
If you're one of those people who can't stand the thought of any living creature -- no matter how ugly and annoying -- being harmed, I'd suggest you stop reading here, because the fact is that gophers are evil creatures that deserve to die a painful, horrifying death. I feel nothing but joy when I club a gopher over the head with a shovel and then toss his lifeless carcass into the orchard as a warning to the other gophers. I've even been known, while in the throes of a gopher-killing frenzy, to cackle evilly and make dire but nonsensical pronouncements such as, "Oh, I'm AFRAID the deflector shield will be QUITE operational when your friends arrive...."
Here's a second disclaimer, before I go any further: the only thing worse than being terrorized by gophers is to have one's incessant whining about said gophers constantly being met with tired, predictable references to Caddyshack. PLEASE STOP, people. That movie is funny to me in the same way that M*A*S*H is funny to someone who lost all four limbs to a wise-cracking alcoholic surgeon in the Korean War. Oh that irrepressible Hawkeye and his lack of attention to proper hygiene!
My brother once asked me to post a video of me trying to kill a gopher to see if I'm funnier than Bill Murray. I told him that I once shot such a video, but that it was "more horrific than funny, like Caddyshack 2." (it consisted mainly of me kicking the gopher until I got bored and then whacking it with a shovel). He suggested that the gophers wouldn't be as much of a problem if I didn't insist on growing a golf course in my backyard. He's got a point -- I probably don't need 50,000 square feet of lawn. But here's the problem: it's not like I can say to the gophers, "Hey, I decided I only need 25,000 square feet of lawn, so you guys can keep the other half." I mean, I could say it, but the gophers wouldn't listen. You see, gophers are greedy, mean-spirited bastards who exist primarily to spite me. They wouldn't be content with their half of the lawn. They'd use it as a training ground for new cadets to be sent out en masse to enemy territory. Trust me, I've tried establishing a perimeter like they do on 24, but so far it's worked, well, about as well as it does on 24.* F---ing Tony Almeida.
Big deal, you say. So they dig a few holes in your yard. No. They dig a gigantic network of tunnels under my yard. It's like the freaking Paris Metro down there, but with gophers instead of Frogs -- a marginal improvement, at best. I've had three garden hoses going for an hour in one of those holes, and the water never comes out. I'm pretty sure there are Fremen in caverns down there nodding with approval.** And the tunnels eventually collapse, and the gophers dig more tunnels, and those collapse, and on and on, until the ground is more wildly uneven than a Jim Carrey movie. There are areas of my property that are so riddled with mounds of dirt and collapsed tunnels that I have to down a handful of Dramamine before my annual weed-mowing on the riding mower.
And that's not all. They also eat your plants. I have actually seen entire plants sucked underground like that girl at the beginning of Jaws. And they know, they somehow KNOW which plants you'd really they rather not eat, and they specifically target them. A gopher will tunnel under a whole bed of carrots or begonias just to chew up the roots of that Japanese Maple that you've been watching grow to the perfect size over the past sixteen years. Because they are EVIL.
Recently I killed a gopher that had been tunneling under the foundation of my house. You might ask why a gopher would tunnel under my house. The answer is simple: because it is trying to destroy my house. There's nothing a gopher might possibly be interested in under my house. There's no food or water, or, uh... gopher porn, or whatever else gophers surf the web searching for.*** The only reason for a gopher to be under my house is to set C4 charges under my house. EVIL.
So, given that gophers are inherently evil, there is only one appropriate response: KILL THEM ALL. Recently I was browsing a
message board, looking for suggestions on how to kill gophers. Nestled amongst opinions on the relative merits of traps, poisons, F&W (flooding and whacking), I found this little treatise:
I am working at an organic school garden and have noticed some gopher mounds near our plants. I came to garden forums to see what solutions were available to me. My predecessor at the garden used quick death traps which I have witnessed in action. Although effective, I felt it was a waste of life, considering I did not make any use of the dead gopher. I am also not completely in relationship to gopher ecology. There is a suburban neighborhood around the garden, as well as some open space in which the soil has been destroyed for fire protection by discing. There are no plants left alive in these zones really. So how am I contributing to the demise of the gopher population (which are major contributors to a healthy ecology in the region) by killing them? These questions would probably at least require a year of observation to get at, and I'm concerned about the annuals I have planted for this season.
The posts I have read on this subject at this forum have left me unsettled. I read mostly war metaphors, dualistic and violent, creating an enemy "other" which is put into deragaotry language and creates rationalizations for small scale genocides. I do not think this attitude is healthy for the survival not only of the human species, but countless others.
I may still trap the gophers but I will not hate them or demonize them. I open the forum up for further discussion on a deeper questioning of the problem of gophers.
Are you KIDDING me? How are you contributing to the demise of the gopher population by killing them? Well, if you're doing it right, you're reducing it. Which is an inherently good thing, because gophers are EVIL. There is no need to demonize them; that was taken care of by SATAN when he CREATED THEM TO TORMENT ME. Sorry for the deragaotry language.
I still haven't found the best method for killing them. Traps work sometimes, although trapping isn't as gratifying as flooding and whacking. Attempts at asphyxiation via exhaust pipe and garden hose have thus far been unsuccessful. And to those of you who keep suggesting putting Juicy Fruit in the holes -- I'm pretty sure that was a rumor started by a couple of gophers with a taste for chewing gum. One wiseguy on the forum suggested, in response to this idea, "chewing the gum while setting traps."
Mr. Living in Harmony with Gophers may not hate them, but I do. Accuse me of using "war metaphors" if you want, but know this: it's not a metaphor. I am at war with the gophers. I will kill them all, by any means necessary. And since I seem to be making a lot of obscure pop culture references in this post, here's one more for you:
I came here to chew Juicy Fruit and kick ass. And I'm all out of Juicy Fruit.
*Have you noticed that no episode of 24 has ever ended with Jack Bauer saying, "Thank God we established that perimiter! Now let's all go home and get some sleep!"
**If you get this reference, you are a huge geek.
***Gophers don't actually surf the web, as they are still bitter about http becoming the de facto standard Internet protocol. Wow, what is up with the obscure references in this post?