Gopher removal tips

So we're selling our house and the gophers are freaking everywhere! We've lived here for 20 years and have had various wars with the gophers..

We normally put a hose down the hole and when they come up I would flip them In a bucket and relocate them to somewhere else but now they aren't coming up anymore. I guess they finally got wise to it haha!

What do you do to get rid of these guys? I would rather not kill them but we really need the yard to not be tore back so any ideas would help =P

Thanks!

Ever seen Caddy Shack? Don't do that...:rofl:

Try buying a couple of firework "Smoke bombs", the ones with the colored smoke and throwing them down the hole. I had a friend who lived in a rural area and he said that it always worked for him.

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Originally Posted by apple2

Try buying a couple of firework "Smoke bombs", the ones with the colored smoke and throwing them down the hole. I had a friend who lived in a rural area and he said that it always worked for him.

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x2. Any sorta smoke grenade type contraption to flush them out. Be reading with a pellet gun to shoot them when they come out, or a pitchfork to make some gopher shish-kebabs.

I'll do a mix of the two haha rodent shaped smoke bombs =P

We actually tried the smoke bombs they sell that are made for killing gophers and it didn't do anything. They worked in the past though so my guess is we ether have super gophers or the product has been regulated down so much that it's ineffective =/

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Originally Posted by Scubaf250

I'll do a mix of the two haha rodent shaped smoke bombs =P

We actually tried the smoke bombs they sell that are made for killing gophers and it didn't do anything. They worked in the past though so my guess is we ether have super gophers or the product has been regulated down so much that it's ineffective =/

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Well when you get them dont relocate them, kill them...
My grandfather battled chipmunks in my yard for yearssss. Finally last year id had enough of their chirping waking me up early and them eating my veggies that i worked hard for. I was woken up by them particularly early one morning last summer. I went and got my pellet gun. I killed a dozen of them by like 7oclock in the morning. The rest of the summer they stayed outta our yard lol.
I dont like killing animals but the trapping and releasing down the road just wasnt working!

I usually use the hose method too.
I fill all holes so that the gophers have no escape tunnels to go out of. They dig up an emergency exit for themselves usually.

Bombing them is always effective too.

And I hear shoving some ferret poop down their hole will help. It tends to repel prey type critters.

Let your snakes go down into the holes... Problem solved. :D

Use a Boxer! I have a boxer who absolutely hates them. When we first moved to our house we had 4-6 of them. We let our boxer outside and she took 'care' of them.

And by the way a 50lb dog can launch a 20lb groundhog about 8ft in the air.

Solved my problem in about 3 days and they haven't returned.

When I lived up north we had ground hogs. I'm guessing that these are at the very least similar to the gophers you are talking about. I think the only way to get rid of them without killing them was to live trap them and put them 5 or more miles away. For the most part they were sorted out with a shotgun/rifle. (I lived on a small farm, so I don't know if you can do this where you live. I guess thats why people say pellet gun.)

There is a big difference between a gopher, which is either this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_gopher , or a small ground squirrel, and a groundhog, which is also known as a woodchuck or marmot.

Woodchucks are enormous, lol. Their hole is big enough to send a dachshund down, and they can do a lot more damage. It would take a lot more to kill one of those.

Large native snake could do the trick for gophers, though--a big bull or black snake, maybe. :)

A Great Dane may be overkill for gophers...might want to go with a terrier, that is what they were bred for, lol.

I have a miniature pincher! He would totally kill them too but they never come up... their network of tunnels has to be huge because the water just keeps going in and they never come up.. I sat in the yard with a pellet gun and a hose down a bunch of holes for a really long time yesterday and nothing came up. Today there were 4 new mounds in different places than where I tried yesterday..

Fireworks and ferrets are illegal here so I guess thats not going to work and my neighbor said he's been poisoning them with this special tool that puts the bait right in their tunnel for a couple months with no good results.

The snakes would totally work! Hahaha maybe I just need to go out into the hills and catch some gopher snakes, then I'll just need a couple mongoose to eat the snakes, and maybe some hawks to eat the mongoose. Lol!

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Originally Posted by Slim

Ever seen Caddy Shack? Don't do that...:rofl:

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Lol....that's the first thing that came to mind when I saw the title of the thread.