People in Saskatchewan have a love/hate relationship with gophers.
Gainer, the cuddly mascot for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, is a beloved gopher that hails from the small town of Parkbeg, approximately 60 kilometres west of Moose Jaw.
But people who deal with gophers and their prolific hole digging often find themselves at war with the furry creatures.
Chuck Toney, who farms near Gull Lake in southwest Saskatchewan, sees first-hand the scale of the damage gophers can do to cropland.
He said that after successive years of drought, gophers have thrived, especially in his meadow brome pastures.
“Meadow brome isn’t really drought tolerant and it just gave up and quit. The gophers moved in with a vengeance because there’s no forage there to hide them,” Toney said, adding that gophers love overgrazed pastures and bare ground so they can spot predators.
“Their population just exploded. I call it ‘gopher-pocalypse.'”
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Legacy of gopher destruction
Gophers are not a new problem. Back in 1917, Saskatchewan declared May 1 a working holiday. More than 900 schools were closed for the day and kids were set loose in the country. Their goal was to catch, shoot or snare gophers that were wreaking havoc on agricultural land.
The child who killed the most gophers was gifted a Shetland Pony. For years, the provincial government offered a bounty on gopher tails.
Today, Toney is one of many Saskatchewan’s farmers who see their land as a battlefield. And where there are a lot of gophers, there are also a lot of badgers ready to eat the smaller rodents. Badgers dig especially big holes that can harm farm equipment and animals like horses and cows, leading to expensive repairs.
Toney said he has spent a lot of money on poison, guns and ammo to clear his land of as many gophers as he can. While this effort means his farm is not a ‘gopherpocalypse’ anymore, he has to be consistently on top of the issue.
Gopher-plagued farmers team up with hunters
The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM) and the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federations are looking for ways to reduce to gopher population.
Darrell Crabbe, executive director of the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation, said a good way to do this is find hunting enthusiasts who are interested in taking care of the gopher madness.
“[We’ve been] putting the hunting community in touch with landowners that were experiencing that issue. So we just thought this was a very, very straightforward opportunity for us to be the, you know, just the conduit for the two different interests and put them together,” Crabbe said.
Using poison
Methods for controlling the gopher population have changed over the years. Poison, including strychnine, was widely used in Saskatchewan and Alberta until it was banned by Health Canada in 2023. The federal department determined it was poisoning more than just the intended gophers.
Toney uses poison in his ongoing battle with the critters: Rozol, which is in a lot of rat poisons, and the zinc phosphide rodenticide poison Borozeit.
Shawn Sherwood, who runs Poulin’s Pest Control in Regina, said there are other methods for those who have small clusters of gopher holes in their yards and other property. One is called Giant Destroyer, which contains a sulfur gas cartridge.
“You light the cartridge, put it down into the hole, shovel wadded up piece of paper in, and then cover it with dirt. The newspaper prevents the dirt from snuffing out the cartridge and it pumps out a ton of sulfur gas and it suffocates the little monsters,” Sherwood said.
What are gophers good for?
Toney is certainly not a fan of gophers, but admits they are part of the ecosystem and therefore important. He said Mother Nature can take care of things, as long at the gopher population is at a healthy level and the ecosystem is diverse.
And while Sherwood’s whole business is getting rid of pesky critters, he said he accepts and recognizes the need for a certain percentage of gophers in the wild.
“They are a food source for a lot of animals and they do have benefits. But at times you get a massive overpopulation and at the end of the day you have to sit down and say, ‘OK, do I benefit the rodents, or do I benefit the humans?'”
This story is from CBC’s This is Saskatchewan podcast — your connection to the stories Saskatchewan is talking about. Every week, Sam Maciag and Nichole Huck will cover local issues that matter. Hear the voices that are creating change, shaping policy and fuelling creativity in Saskatchewan.
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