Groundhog Wars, Finale

A tale of regret and sadness...  And don't read this if you are squeamish.  Groundhogs were killed.

Some of you may know that I have been fighting with a groundhog this year.  It burrowed in under my shed last Fall.  I saw it several times running back to the shed when I went out to the garden.  I got pictures of it with my GameSpy camera a few ties. 

I used to hunt.  I was good enough at it to get a deer several years in a row with bow&arrow.  I stopped when I had to field-dress a lactating doe I killed.  Milk ran out of her.  My heart wasn't in it after that.  I have generally tried to live and let live.  When deer ate all the leaves from the pole beans one year and some neighbors sicced a dog after my cat a week later, I built a 6' fence around the entire back yard.  Prevention is better than cure.

If I see an occasional possum or raccoon on the deck or in the yard, I live with it.  Just yesterday, some raccoon or snake ate all the baby robins in a nest I was watching daily.  And I don't mind what the cats catch and kill the occasional bird or mouse.  Nature is nature, and I can't stop it.  That doesn't mean I have to participate in it.  BTW, I eat meat, so I am aware of my part in killing animals for food.  They are raised to be food, and I support systems that kill them as gently as possible.

But I raise some of my own vegetable food, and I am protective about it.  Groundhogs are a problem here.  In the past, I have trapped them and released them in unoccupied fields.  I read that was illegal. So I had to resort to other means. 

I had a pond and have a Have-A-Hart trap I have used before.  A dip into the pond, a minute of confusion, a few bubbles, and they are dead.  Short of a .22 to the head (which I cannot do in a suburban neighborhood nor safely from a few inches away because of blood-spray), it is the least-sufferring way I can thing of.  They don't seem frightened, just confused,   Then "blurp" and dead.

But the pond is dry from a leak I cannot find, and with all the heavy rocks on the liner, I just haven't replaced it.  I regret that very much today...   I very much wish I had had a pond to drop her into.  It would have been very much easier on us both.

It started when I heard a noise behind the shed while I was weeding the garden.  I ran over to find 3 groundhog pups in a pile.  I had a garden fork in hand, and I used it to kill them.  In spite of her fear, Mrs Groundhog came out of her den to yell at me.  I used the garden fork to set one dead pup in the burrow hole and one in the side of the shed.

I did not enjoy it.  It was far more than slapping a mosquito or stepping on a cockroach.  It was almost like killing a fawn.  They cried.  And I cried.  I did not do physically hard work, but I was sweating terribly afterwards.  It was very upsetting.

I caught Mrs Groundhog in the Have-A-Hart trap after, and tried to release her outside the fence.  I expected her to run straight away from the house, but she ran straight around the fence back towards her den.

I hoped she would leave for a safer den after that, but she didn't.  I caught her eating my lettuce the other afternoon.  So I set the trap back up, unbaited, right in her most-observed exit point.  She was in it today.

I could have spread plastic sheeting and filled up the dry pond temorarily.  I wish I had.  But wasting that much water didn't seem good either.  People are dying from lack of water in places.  I finally decided to "shoot" her with arrows.  A small animal ought to die quickly from that. 

I held an arrow just above her and slammed down a piece of 2x4 on it as a wide hammer.  It didn't even penetrate her body.  All it did was break the nock off the back.  It took several other tries to actually stab through her.  I felt sick.  But badly wounded, she could not be released to die of infection after days.

There are some things you start that you can't stop.  When you injure an animal badly enough, you have to follow through and end it.  My Father was good enough to teach me that.  When you injure a deer fatally with an arrow, you are obligated to spend all the time needed to follow the blood trail and finish it off to stop the pain. 

I was good at that.  One drop of blood in ten feet of woodland leaves, I could find them.  Because it was only fair.  You injure it, you kill it as quickly as possible for their sake.  You kill it, you claim it and end your hunting season. Even if it is found days later and the meat is wasted.  Because it is the right thing to do IF you are going to hunt animals.

I am very sorry that Mrs Groundhog lived an hour after being stabbed with arrows.  If I could have thought of some less inhumane way of eliminating her from my garden, I would have.  I wish I had refilled the pond temporarily.  And it occurs to me now that my bathtub is bigger and deeper than the trap.  I could have drowned her quickly in there.

But I don't want to kill any more groundhogs.  Its the shed that attracts them.  So I have decided to spray herbicides all around the edges, dig up the soil after a few weeks, and install mesh wire all around it.

I don't want to have to hurt another poor wild animal for just trying to live as best it can.  Life is hard enough.  Tangling with humans shouldn't be part of that.  I don't want to have to kill another Mrs Groundhog again. 

I an feeling rather horrible tonight.  I don't want to feel that way again ever...

Cavebear