Steps to take on how to humanely kill gophers

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How are you planning on killing your gophers? Or is that what you're here to find out? Because we aren’t going to give you the answer to “how to kill gophers”. In many states across America, it’s actually illegal for you to kill the gopher in certain circumstances. You’ll need to have a chat with your local authorities to see where the law stands on these rodents, and how you are permitted to remove them from your land. Even though these animals are considered to be nuisance wildlife, they’re still protected in certain states, and there are some species (mostly in Mexico) that are even endangered and critically endangered. We need to start taking care of the ecosystem we're living in, otherwise it won’t be able to take care of us right back.



Poison
We’ll start with poison and get it out the way nice and early. It is never a good idea to use poison to get rid of any nuisance wildlife. This even applies to rats and mouse — the rodents you're often advised to use poison against. The gopher is a rodent, but the poison for rats and mice will be even less effective on gophers than it is on the rodents it was intended for.

Poison works because it contains anticoagulants, but because those anticoagulants take a while to do what they do, the death of an animal after poisoning is usually a long time away from the initial ingestion. Rats are quite cautious eaters, often tasting food to see how it is before finally feasting on it. Mice are a bit dumber than that, jumping in and caring about the consequences later on. That’s what rodent populations are booming. People think poison works and rely on it as a regular form of rodent control. It doesn’t. And in the time that it’s not working, a rat infestation of ten has become a rat infestation of a hundred.

This isn’t the case with gophers. They aren’t really that friendly to each other, and they definitely don’t seem to like sharing their burrows. You won’t find more than one gopher living in the same tunnel system, unless they are bringing up a family. Speaking of which, whatever action you choose to take, you should take in the later stages of winter, right before spring hits. Early to mid spring at the latest. If you do leave your gopher removal action any later than that, you won’t just be getting rid of one gopher. It will more than likely have had babies.

Gophers take food back to their underground tunnels and stash it for when they need it. If they take poisoned food back there, it could be weeks before they finally get around to eating it, if they eat it at all. The potency of the poison may have had a chance to deteriorate. You’d also need quite a lot of the stuff to make sure you got the job done. Plus, in general, poison just takes a long time to work. We don’t really know why it says “fast acting” on the label, because it's not. It takes weeks for an animal to die once it has ingested rodent poison, because the cause is internal bleeding by ingesting of anticoagulants, such as Warfarin. This isn't something that happens quickly, over the course of a few hours. It's sometime that can take days, weeks, months sometimes. It's a long, painful, and incredibly inhumane death.

That leaves either lethal snap traps or flooding. The lethal snap traps require special permits which are only usually granted in certain, special circumstances. Flooding is really inhumane and actually unnecessary. There are ways that you can evict these creatures from your land without resorting to such drastic measures. You can even use the idea of flooding to do it, but the aim is to encourage the creature to leave, not to kill it.

Read the How to Get Rid of Gophers page.
For more information, you may want to click on one of these guides that I wrote:
How To Guide: Who should I hire? - What questions to ask, to look for, who NOT to hire.
How To Guide: do it yourself! - Advice on saving money by doing wildlife removal yourself.
Guide: How much does wildlife removal cost? - Analysis of wildlife control prices.