Natural Born (Gopher) Killer

Maccabee gopher trap

Some people who move to rural environments find they enjoy hunting game and vermin, and even killing livestock for their personal consumption.  I am not one of them. 

Yet when the gopher population began to creep up in numbers here at the homestead, I went through a gradual process that, yes, has finally turned me into an unapologetic killer at times.  Sure, I may still save flies and put glass cups over moths and spiders who make it into the house, returning them all outside to live another day. But gophers have become to me what red fire ants have always been:  Something that doesn't need to be living anywhere close to where I work, walk or grow my food.

Yesterday, I successfully trapped and killed the gopher that had been making inroads into my potato, onion and pumpkin patch down in the field. It was a double victory for me, because I used a Maccabee trap to kill the gopher, which is the same gopher control method used at the winery we belong to.  That means no poison is used, which means the hawks, lizards, coyotes and other wildlife are safe from either finding the poison pellets or the poisoned gopher corpse and dying from ingesting either.  It also means that the same poison will not be working its way down through the dirt into the aquifer, as strychnine does .  A trap may be primitive and violent, but at least it only kills once, when it catches its intended victim.  You can't say the same thing about poison.

But it also occurred to me that if the winery uses these traps to keep their vineyards pest-free, vermin killings occur everywhere, whether it's in our food, the cotton that makes our clothes, or even the grapes that produce the wine we drink. There is, truly, no food we eat where something has not probably died in order that it could be brought to us.

I was a vegetarian for years and never thought of things this way.  Sure, I did not consume animal flesh, but that doesn't mean animals didn't die to bring me my grains and vegetables.

There is no getting away from this anywhere on Planet Earth, sadly.  If you eat food, mammals have been killed so that it can grow, be harvested, and brought to you.

So while I hate to think of myself as being a responsible party in all this, I am, whether I am the one placing the trap or not.  I eat food, I wear clothes, I drink wine. To believe I have no culpability in it all would be magical thinking.  

Perhaps in the next world killing will be a thing of the past, but in this one, it seems unescapable. Yet I have to say I never really realized it until I picked up that trap and held that lifeless gopher in my hands.  It's not the first gopher I've killed.  After all, I've eaten commercial food that was probably protected with traps just like this one.  But this was the first time I've actually realized my role in it all.  Natural-born killer.  Me.