Gopher Invasion Threatens Western Canadian Farms

CANADA - A voracious rodent is digging holes in Canada's vast western plains and in the pockets of farmers, who lamented Tuesday they were left with no means to curb a gopher baby boom after the only effective pesticide was banned.
calendar icon 9 May 2007
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Alberta cattle feeding on a ranch outside Calgary, Canada.

As a result many fields have turned brown and are unsuitable for grazing cattle and yet farmers are being denied crop insurance and have lost up to thrity percent of planted crops in recent years.

The gopher, or Richardson's ground squirrel, has long been a part of life on the prairies, but their numbers spiked after the federal government banned the use of liquid strychnine in the late 1990s because the poison also killed animals that eat gophers, including hawks, foxes and weasels.

It was a replaced with a much less potent version that farmers now say is ineffective.

"We're still trying to understand how things got so bad," said Gilbert Proulx, a wildlife biologist hired by Ottawa to try to stem the critter baby boom. He is testing new poisons on plots in southwest Saskatchewan.

He suspects a combination of fewer predators, parched farmlands ideal for burrowing, and a trend toward higher quality crops that the critters find delectable, is partly to blame for the gopher population explosion.

Roland Schafer, a farmer in southwestern Saskatchewan, told public broadcaster CBC the pests are eating up profits and threatening farms.

He has been shooting them, he said, but they multiply faster than he can reload his shotgun.

Source: France 24
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