Killed me a gopher!!!!!!whoo-hooo!!!

ok lately my posts have been about gophers... this being my biggest problem in the garden!!! lately i have been sickened by the evidence of a gopher in my raised bulb bed.. i lined it with regular ole chicken wire back in oct. not realizing that the chicken wire openings were big enough for them to get thru (i hadnt seen these gophers in person before) i wanted to cry when i saw one of my larkspur gone, and a plugged gopher hole in its place... i had just moved alll my larkspur, snapdragons, delphiums, stock, and panseys into that bed to save them from the gophers in my big bed... so i made a smaller bed, but this time lined the bottom with tiny tiny wire.. 1/4" wire... and moved them all AGAIN!!!!... so lets hope that works.. anyway back to the subject of this post.. i was out having my morning coffee, doing my rounds, looking at all my flowers and plantings, when i saw one of my cats, Valentino, over by a compost pile i have covered with a tarp.. he was all excited, i figured he was chasing a mouse... well a few minutes later, here he comes beside my raised bed with a gopher in his mouth.. i thought good kitty.. (: the gopher LOOKED dead...so i went about my buisness , and all of a sudden i saw him all excited again looken like he's chasing something.. i thought.. oh please dont say it was alive and he let it go...(valentino likes to play with his prey before he kills it) well i thought i would "help " him out by moving the two potted plants for him where the gopher was hiding... welllll valentino was excited to see me, so left the live gopher to come to me.. i pick up the cat, move the pot and tossed the cat where the gopher was..the gopher takes off running across my gardens , across the driveway, and i go after him with a big shovel.. i thought , 'you @$$#0!&, i'm gonna get ur flower eating @$$' ... so here i go running like a native mad-woman with shovel in hand , mumbling to myself.. he gets to the weeds on the other side of the driveway, and SLAM, down the shovel goes, the backside of the shovel goes down into the weeds... i start smacking the shovel down over and over in a 6 ft square area.. hoping i got the flower eater!!!! yelling 'take that, and that, and this...HOW do you like me NOW!!!!!!' I only felt slight saticfaction, since i didnt see him dead, but it felt good to let out on him... well here about half an hour ago, my mama cat brought a gopher (as she does every morning , usually 3 of them a morning) to her kitties.. and i take a look at this gopher and his mid-section is flat.. as though he were hit with a shovel by a native looking rambling mad-woman with a shovel, with weeds in the pockets of his mouth !!!! i have to say it sure felt good to kill the gopher myself...(: even better then trapping....sick i know, but it kills me to watch all these beautiful flowers grow so big only to become food for these rodents!!!!

ROFLMBO Im the native looking rambling mad worman with a shovel for my area. LOL You tell a great story.

ROTFLMAO!!!!

can you see someone driving by seeing and hearing this going on?????LOL

ROFLMBO!
I'm imagining a Real Estate agent driving by on the way to show a family a house up the street . . . "this is a nice quiet neighborhood. perfectly safe for the kids . . . "

Cheri'

remind me NEVER to traspass in your garden. way to go.

That is so funny, I had to put my glass down and wipe my eyes!!

lol... well i am glad the story made u guys laugh... i was quite tickled with fact he was dead... yes i am sure my neighbor across from me was wondering what the heck was going on.. i am sure i looked like a hillbilly whacking at that gopher.. lol people think all of us that live in this area are a bunch of crazy hillbillys anyway.. we always hear... ohhhh so ur one of THEM!!!..lol.. we dont mind.. infact we agree with them , it keeps people that dont belong back here out of this area...its too secluded back here to have them city-folk running amuck around here!!!! (:

cici77, I love your thinking! You sound just like my family! It's great to know that there are more of US!

Great story! I can just see you flailing away with the shovel. If the men in white coats haven't shown up yet you are probably safe enough from neighborhood opinion. Keep that shovel handy, those little critters have large families and there are probably more flower eaters lurking.

Hah! Oh, what a mental image. I don't blame you one bit - I'd be glad to have gotten him, too.

Good story but i spent the evening watering one down and the 2 lil guyz and i chasing it back and forth in the garden and he got away!!! GRRRRRRRRRR

We did this several yrs ago and ended up killing 12 with golf clubs or whatever was handy-oh and one mole!!! That was in the tiny garden and i could water them down and they would run-my big garden is so big i dont know how to catch him!

POISIONS???
Oh how i want to wack a gopher with a shovel!!!! I need a CAT too!

Whooping it up with a shovel in hand
she slaughtered the gopher disturbing her land.
She pounded him good until he was dead
cause he ate her flowers and she saw red.

So if you see CiCi out a runnin' around
beatin' and bangin' and poundin' the ground
Do not, for her sanity fear,
but expect to see a dead gopher near.

LOL! These we must must save!

LOLOLOL..snort, snort!! This thread just made my day!
Pati

ZANYMUSE!!!!LOL. THAT IS SO CUTE.. I LOVE IT!!! i am gonna copy and paste it for my mom, she will get a kick out of it! lol...

maryE, i only have one neighbor.. he is across the road... and he is used to seeing me running from and yelling at wasps... lol he prob got a kick out of it... i guess i will have to set traps today.. one gopher ate my clematis!!! arent they poisonuos??? i would love to poison them but i cant with the cats...

notmartha, thats a shame he got away... i saw another gopher while pouring my concrete , he popped his head out , took his grubby little claws and was pulling pieces of it down his hole.. so again i got my shovel and snuck around the one garden , by the time he saw me i was about 4ft away.. and i slammed the shovel in the ground chopping , and chopping and chopping... i thought i got him, but this morning i noticed my clematis GONE! sigh.. i guess i will have to set a trap or two.. sigh.. will the baddle ever end...? my one black cat had kitties... we gave two away, and i am keeping the other 4..... they are all black.. the black ones out of all the cats i have even had seem to be the best hunters.. then my other female had 4 kitties a few days ago, and they are all black.. i think i am keeping all of them too.. these black cats are gopher hunters.. i have 3 black adult cats, all three of them hunt gophers everyday.. that ought to tell u how many we have around here.. so hopefully they will help keep the population down.. plus they catch bunnies too.. and they eat both the gophers and the bunnies...

Zany, that's great. You should call it "The Ballad of CiCi the Gopherslayer"!

From the golf club experience from Not Martha, I'm getting a clear visual of Bill Murray's "Carl" character in Caddyshack. I can see their heads flying now and hear "Carl" mumbling about the demise of "le Gopher"! LMAO!!

If you get cats to hunt your gophers, moles mice etc. make sure you get them from a Mother Cat Who Hunts!! I have some who are totally useless...we got field mice in our new house, shortly after building and moving in. They just watched them No killing. No chasing. Cat #1, "Hey, look, there's a mouse!!" Cat #2, "yeah, I know, so what?" Cat #3, "Aren't you guys going to kill it?", Cat#4, "Nahh, you kill it, I just had lunch". Cat#1, "It's not my job, I'm the sun tracker and it's time for my nap". Cat #2, "I've got cat toys, I'm not playing with a dirty old mouse". Cat#3, "I'd do it, but I have to go look for dust bunnies under the beds". Cat#4, "I'm not doing it either, I didnt let it in".

Also tried those stickly traps outside doorways and in the garage. Death count, 14 spiders, 32 crickets, and one tennis shoe.

You expect them to be beautiful and work too?? lol

I get these from a friend in town and I think they are the best mousetraps ever! They are from Intruder, Inc., 230 W. Coleman St., Rice Lake, WI 54868 800-553-5129 DH keeps 3 in the shop and if he sees mouse evidence, checks to see if the traps are set. Usually they've been tripped by being pushed around, set them and by the next day, no more mousies!

Those look nice, Kooger! I looked them up on Google and there are several online sources for them if your local store doesn't sell them. Here's the first hit: http://www.usahardware.com/inet/shop/item/92360/icn/20-735894/intruder/16000.htm

I should have mentioned that's dried up peanut butter on it, not mouse guts. I even had one dangling by a paw when I picked it up but it never got away! gw - that ad says 30% stronger than conventional but I've managed to catch my finger playing with it and I didn't think it hurt THAT much! lol Guess they're not toys!

Hello cici: Boy, that was a wonderful story and you have great writing skills. You really painted a picture in my mind !!!!
Now reach around to your back pocket and pull out that 9" Buck knife and carve a notch on your shovel handle. Ha, who needs a cat when Cici is at bat. Keep patroling that fence line.

hi nada, thanx.. lol.. i have chased a few other gophers since that first one.. again with my big spade shovel! three to be exact.. and all of them with their heads out of their holes pulling my flowies down with their grimey little claws.., one was pulling down chunks of my daylily, he was so involved with what he was doing, that i had time to go in the other direction to get my weapon, tip toe around one of the gardens and get about 3 ft from the flower eater, he stopped, looked me right in the eye for a second of "face-off".. then i went charging with my gopher war cry...stabbing the ground over and over with my weapong of choice!!!! i managed to even kill one of my little ground covers near-bye, but it sacrificed itself for the cause... i dont know if i killed the heathen or not, but that garden area was gopher-free for a few weeks.. the other time was similar to that time but, i had to throw one of my cats at him because my shovel, i knew ,would not go thru the hard dirt he had his ugly rat-like head stiking out of.. the gopher stuck his head back in the hole and the cat stayed there on gaurd till he popped back up and WHAM! the cat gottem!!! the cat was heavely rewarded that day!!! (: this last gopher hunt story was one of the most rewarding i have had the pleasure in doing.. i was sitting in my chair inside the house... when all of a sudden i hear one of maamaa kitties babies crying outside.. as if it were in a cat fight... while 'Sweets' my other "maama" kittie is at the window growling.. i jump up and look out the window.. i dont see anything.. so i let the growling cat out to go after whatever was hurting the baby... she runs over to where the kittie was... i look back out the window and here is what i see, i see mama kittie laying under the swing, and all four kitties in a half circle around her... and in the middle of this circle is a big fat GOPHER sitting up on its hind legs with one clawed paw (is that what u call gopher hands?) out infront of itself like a defending cat, swinging at the kitties that come too close.. now here comes 'Sweets' (the growling cat i let out to protect the babies) she sees whats going on and lays down by mama kittie.. this must have been a training session for the babies , i assume 'mama' caught the gopher and dropped it for her kitties to kill.. well anytime one would get brave enough to attack the gopher, the gopher would strike back and the kittie would scream.. when-ever the gopher would try to make a run for it mama would very smoothly whack it back to the circle of kitties.. well hubby hears me say , "IT'S A FRICKEN GOPHER!!!!" so he heads out to shoot it with his .22, he's out the front door in a flash , barely giving me enough time to yell at him to STOOOOPPPPPP!!!!! (remembering how i distracted the 'Valentino' before and he lost intrest of the gopher that HE brought to my garden) well it was too late., all the kitties looked over at my hubby and off the gopher went, into one of my gardens.. i swore some very un-lady like words about or i should say to the gopher, and went to get my weapon, all the while muttering under my breath... by the time i get over to the garden two of the kitties found him again.. but he was hiding under one of my glass look-alike lids to a garden art piece i have, and again he was almost hissing at the kitties thru this "glass" (more like plastic) .. i grin! i flip the lid out of his protection, with the spade just above him, he then turns his hissing and claws up at me.. my grin turns to a smile and down the shovel goes.. but i miss him (hey, i never said i was a great aim!) he then gets madder swatting at my shovel, all it took was my war cry and down the shovel went again with all its might, across the neck of the gopher.. OFF WITH HIS HEAD!!!!!!!! as soon as i pulled the spade up three kitties pounced the two parts of the gopher.. i then sang my victory song, "Ding dong, the gophers dead , the gophers dead... ding dong the ugly gophers deeeaaad.. as i skipped my way back into my house to come back to reading the posts on daves garden! (: so with those two war storys i end it with a pic of one of my very good hunters 'Valentino' doing what he does best... looking for gophers...(: (yes that IS half his body in a gopher hole!) lol


This message was edited Jul 19, 2004 3:57 PM

Valentino obviously takes his job seriously. The stories are great fun.

yes he does..lol.. here is another pic of him.. getting ready to pounce in the whole (pic above) ... they get very excited before they attack...

now u have to know 'Valentino' got his name be his is a loooover.... i mean this cat is bad... he loves to lay on his back on ur lap and have u rub his belly as he stretches and cuddles u... as i was on my computer he was laying on the arm of my chair and kept touching my arm.. i look over at him and this is what i see looking at me.. lol.. he kinda looks like a vampire... lolol..