Gophers: Cute and Essential

So, we got a local discussion going on here about gophers. Heather Hacking's Blog SowThere has two articles in the last three weeks. (One & Two) and Jeremy Miller's blog has one. Gophers can be a problem and or a delight.

I am here to make give pause and paws (and beak and claws) to the killing. So there is my article on why I don't kill gophers, and below are a few youtube videos meant to do just that.

The first is the cutest gopher movie - about a real life pet gopher - then there are the ones about the predators - and gophers have lots of them. Coyotes, egrets, herons, many varieties of hawks, and owls - especially Barn Owls, cats and dogs. My personal favorite gopher predator is the gopher snake. Haven't yet found a video of a gopher snake eating a gopher.

So my suggestion, is when possible, make your environment more friendly to those predators of the gopher rather than eliminating them yourself. In a natural system you are looking for balance, not perfection. Same as you want some plants with aphids in your garden to attract beneficial predators, same goes for the larger "pests". Everything contributes, as I said in my other post on gophers.

(No comment on the "sport" of gopher fishing.)

The thing is, that gophers just have a darn hard time. Everything seems to like to eat them. So - you want eagles and egrets, herons and wolves, coyotes and cats, dogs and snakes, barn owns and other fowles - to just starve to death?

Go gopher go!


















! But then there are tons of ways to make a living selling stuff that just doesn't seem to solve the gopher problem in the long run. Here are some gopher killing resources.!