A new tourist attraction in Saskatchewan: come on out and shoot all the gophers you want:
"'Gopher tourism' is making inroads across the southern grainbelt, with some farmers offering free room, board and even free ammunition to anyone willing to kill the voracious gophers gobbling up their crops.
Farmers near Swift Current, Sask., are looking for tourists with guns to combat an infestation they say is especially bad near Aneroid, Ponteix and Hazenmore." (...)
"Local officials welcome the gun-toters so long as they save farmers' crops."
Much as I'm an animal lover and usually not in favour of killing them for any reason other than sustenance, in my view, farmers' crops trump gophers' rights. And it really can get that bad with these little rodents.
We have a microcosm of this ugly situation in my neighbourhood, but rather than gophers it's racoons. Thanks to a neighbour who inexplicably started feeding them a few years ago ("Nononono, bad idea!" I told her, to no avail), in the immediate area of 4 or 5 properties we have about 50 raccoons (at least). Between meal times (when they dine on huge bowls of dog food she obligingly puts out on her deck for them) they busy themselves by trashing one neighbour's orchard and chasing another's grandchildren around. Feeding them just emboldens these little masked terrorists. But now we're stuck in a cycle of raccoon-terror: if my neighbour suddenly stopped feeding them, we'd have total mayhem.
There's only one solution to the problem -- well, two, but trapping and relocating them is difficult and time-consuming, as one neighbour is finding out. The other neighbour opted for the easy way: "light 'em up!" It's caused much consternation in the neighbourhood: If you're not with us, you're with the raccoons.
So while "no-bag-limit gopher shoot tourism" might seem a little primitive, I can see where the farmers are coming from.
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