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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJOHN WOODS \/ FREE PRESS <\/p>\n
The gopher has become a cute city-park critter, but it hasn’t always enjoyed an adorable public image.<\/p>\n
Saskatchewan\u2019s NDP government was choosing an animal to symbolize the province, and the suggestion of a gopher was driving some squirrelly.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll bet my Winchester .22 that the NDP government had a hand in naming the gopher as the official representative of the animal kingdom for our Great Plains environment,\u201d wrote one self-identified Westerner in a letter to the Western Producer.<\/p>\n
The author must have been confident in the wager, since a .22 \u2014 a miniature-bore rifle \u2014 is a classic tool for rooting out the entrenched, pestilent threat to the Prairie economy. The letter went on to connect gophers to the left-leaning provincial government, a popular object of ire for its perceived lack of support for farmers.<\/p>\n
In her 2003 delightful short cultural history, Why Shoot the Gopher? Reading the Politics of a Prairie Icon, Alison Calder illustrates how potent those associations are. If Ottawa bans or restricts rodent poisons like strychnine, suddenly headlines in Prairie newspapers ask, \u201cWhat would happen if gophers took over the government?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA highly contested regional icon.\u201d <\/p>\n
Through Calder\u2019s telling, the gopher is \u201ca highly contested regional icon.\u201d<\/p>\n
The confrontations it invites between environmentalists and farmers \u2014 \u201cbig-city fatcat(s) and\u2026 gun-waving hicks\u201d \u2014 represent both Canada\u2019s urban-rural split and East-West tensions.<\/p>\n
And yet it\u2019s a federal Liberal government that farmers can thank for new access to strychnine this spring. The aim is to combat a pestilence of gophers \u2014 technically the Richardson\u2019s ground squirrel \u2014 that reportedly have hit crops hard and injured livestock.<\/p>\n
In March, Agriculture Minister Heath MacDonald and Health Minister Marjorie Michel announced Ottawa was reversing the ban on strychnine, the classic rodent poison used through the 19th century and until the late 20th century that is now heavily restricted in favour of less-deadly rodenticides.<\/p>\n
With the announcement, producers will have access to two per cent liquid strychnine until November 2027. The neurotoxin causes rapid convulsions and then death, usually within a few hours, but is also seen as the highest risk to non-targeted wildlife.<\/p>\n
\u201c(Ground squirrels) have become a serious pest threatening a variety of crops,\u201d the government said in a news release. \u201cThe Prairies have been experiencing abnormally dry conditions, which affects the sustainability and quality of farmlands and allowed the population of these gophers to increase significantly.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA\u00a0serious pest threatening a variety of crops.\u201d <\/p>\n
Prior to Ottawa\u2019s announcement, Alberta Agriculture Minister R.J. Sigurdson suggested \u201cthe annual risk to hay and native pastures exceeds $800 million,\u201d though there\u2019s little accessible data on how much damage ground squirrels \u2014 separate from other agricultural villains like grasshoppers, cutworms and voles \u2014 actually cause in Canada.<\/p>\n
However, Saskatchewan farmer Jeremy Welter put it this way in a Canadian Press report: \u201cI suspect maybe if the Bible had been written in Saskatchewan, it wouldn\u2019t have been locusts. It would have been gophers\u2026 I think (lifting the ban) is one of those things that is long overdue.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just country folk with an itch to reduce this Prairie icon\u2019s numbers.<\/p>\n
In April, the Manitoba government approved the City of Winnipeg\u2019s request to use rodenticides in nine city parks to control rising populations of Richardson\u2019s ground squirrels.<\/p>\n
The city is employing less-controversial forms of rodenticide than strychnine. One is Rozal, an anticoagulant bait that causes internal bleeding; the other is RoCon, a foam asphyxiant that causes suffocation in burrows.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe treatments we chose are used in most major Canadian cities. They pose limited risk to other animals and people,\u201d the city said in a news release.<\/p>\n
The city said it would immediately remove carcasses, post signage 24 hours before and after deploying rodenticide and check sites to ensure non-targeted creatures aren\u2019t among the dead.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Signs at Valour Community Centre announce the start of a ground squirrel eradication program involving provincially approved rodenticide.<\/p>\n Animal welfare groups aren\u2019t having it.<\/p>\n The Winnipeg Humane Society, Animal Justice and Winnipeg biologist James Hare have filed an appeal against the permit, arguing the methods risk harming other wildlife and pets, and inflict a slow, agonizing death on the beleaguered burrower.<\/p>\n Hare, the world\u2019s leading authority on Richardson\u2019s ground squirrels, says he doesn\u2019t identify with \u201creally extreme\u201d animal rights activists on ground squirrel control. But on this issue, the ordinarily jovial University of Manitoba biologist is deadly serious.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any excuse in the city not to live-trap, transport them and have a veterinarian humanely euthanize them,\u201d he says. \u201cOnce this s\u2014- gets in the environment, it\u2019s out there and it\u2019s going to cause deaths, and not just among gophers\u2026 predators pick up carcasses and cart them off. They die their slow death elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGophers are the stupid heroes of springtime. They sight right up the barrel\u2026 as if to say, \u2018Go ahead, blow my guts into crow food,\u2019\u201d writes poet Rick Hillis in Captain Gopher.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any excuse in the city not to live-trap, transport them and have a veterinarian humanely euthanize them.\u201d <\/p>\n Calder\u2019s work, Why Shoot the Gopher?, layers such hardline rhetoric dating from the 1870s, when the Dominion Lands Act accelerated the settlement of the Prairies for agriculture, to roughly the present day.<\/p>\n From lobbying farmers on Parliament Hill to rodent poison advertisements, gophers have been cast as \u201cevil,\u201d \u201cplundering,\u201d a biblical scourge threatening not just the livelihood of farmers, but the very economic life of the West itself.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Gophers portrayed as invading German soldiers in this 1918 poison advertisement.<\/p>\n The ways in which ground squirrels damage agricultural life are well-documented: they feed on young plants, seeds, grasses and legumes, while their tunnels can damage soil structure and create hazards for machinery and livestock.<\/p>\n Despite these nuisances, a more sentimental image of the gopher has emerged as the Prairies have urbanized.<\/p>\n As Calder documents, the gopher has become a cute roadside and city-park critter, a lovable hero used to decorate brochures like those of the City of Winnipeg\u2019s Assiniboine Park Zoo or serve as a mascot for teams like the CFL\u2019s Saskatchewan Roughriders.<\/p>\n This is a long way off from the early 1920s, when gophers were demonized as \u201cBolshewheaties\u201d \u2014 a greedy Prairie proletariat coming for farmers\u2019 grain, an allusion to Soviet Russia\u2019s People\u2019s Commissariat for Food during the Russian Civil War.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Western Municipal News <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n After the Russian Revolution, gophers were portrayed as \u2018Bolshewheaties\u2019 in this 1920 ad for gopher poison. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Later, the anti-American comic Gopher Freedom \u2014 published in Saskatoon in 1973 in response to the Vietnam War and the world oil crisis \u2014 turned this symbolism on its head, treating gophers as figures of political resistance against outside predators. In it, plucky Canadian gophers fend off an invading U.S. army hungry for Canada\u2019s oil and fresh water \u2014 and they celebrate their triumph over the Americans by kissing each other goodnight after a big bonfire.<\/p>\n Such rosy imagery likely fell flat for rural Prairie readers, and probably would today, too.<\/p>\n \u201cIn cities, people can more easily be conservationists: because city dwellers don\u2019t have to use the land in the same way that farmers do,\u201d Calder writes.<\/p>\n In other words, it\u2019s easy to keep your conscience clean if you\u2019ve never had to dirty your hands working the land.<\/p>\n In Hare, the Richardson\u2019s ground squirrel has a whiskery champion.<\/p>\n He\u2019s contributed to innovative, catchily titled research articles about the contagious nature of prairie dogs\u2019 jump-yips (\u201cCatch the wave\u2026\u201d), false alarm signals among Richardson\u2019s ground squirrels (\u201cThe Squirrel that cried wolf\u2026\u201d), the effects of climate change on male ground squirrel virility (\u201cShooting blanks\u2026\u201d) and beyond.<\/p>\n When he talks and writes about Richardson\u2019s ground squirrels, it\u2019s easy to detect not just a sharp sense of humour, but a natural affinity for the remarkably adaptive, oft-misunderstood, little subterranean architects and survivors of Canada\u2019s climate extremes.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t MIKE DEAL \/ FREE PRESS<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n James Hare, a world-renowned Richardson\u2019s ground squirrel expert, opposes the city\u2019s poison campaign. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n After recommending Calder\u2019s essay, he emphasizes all the good ground squirrels bring to the Prairies \u2014 from aerating soil, dispersing seeds, controlling certain pests and weeds like Smoothe Brome to increasing plant diversity and other long-term benefits that can be hard to appreciate when all a farmer sees is the immediate pain these critters are causing.<\/p>\n \u201cThey have been the scapegoat forever, right?\u201d Hare says.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, he resists the view the \u201curban\u201d approach to gophers and wildlife is more enlightened.<\/p>\n \u201c(Rural communities) are working the land\u2026 and they have to do what\u2019s right to make ends meet. Generally speaking, they are good stewards of the land,\u201d he says. \u201cI do understand that in some contexts we do have to practise (gopher) control\u2026 (and) the old-school method is probably, on balance and all things considered, the best.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s referring to techniques that don\u2019t rely on poison, such as traps and shooting \u2014 and which are encouraged by initiatives like the gopher eradication program operated by the Rural Municipality of Stanley in southern Manitoba.<\/p>\n \u201c(Rural communities) are working the land\u2026 and they have to do what\u2019s right to make ends meet.\u201d <\/p>\n Running from spring until Sept. 1, the program offers a $1 bounty for every gopher or mole tail turned in and is open to youth under age 18. It\u2019s one of only a few programs of its kind left on the Prairies.<\/p>\n In general, Hare would prefer to see gopher-control season shortened.<\/p>\n \u201cControl efforts after roughly July 1 each year are futile, and even detrimental in that all adult Richardson\u2019s ground squirrels are safely hibernating by then, so control efforts only kill young-of-the-year, depriving predators that would otherwise keep ground squirrel populations in check,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t As shown in this 1918 map from a provincial government brochure advocating for gopher eradication, three species of gopher species were distributed across southern Manitoba. <\/p>\n Ironically, he adds, this can hurt predators, reducing their numbers, and in turn lead to explosive population growth of ground squirrels and pests in the future. Trying to disrupt nature\u2019s rhythms can sometimes intensify their tempo.<\/p>\n Yet, on the whole, he sees programs like the RM of Stanley\u2019s as more humane and ecologically sensitive than what\u2019s in store for Winnipeg\u2019s parks.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the hands of a decent marksperson, (squirrels) die very quickly. You\u2019re also not causing that collateral damage to other species. In fact, in many ways, you\u2019re helping scavengers,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n A trophy decorated with rifle shells sits on Luc Lahaie\u2019s desk.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a little internal, little fun thing,\u201d says the chief administrative officer for the RM of Stanley. \u201cWe\u2019re an open book. We don\u2019t shy away from what\u2019s reality here.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t SUPPLIED<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n The Gopher trophy<\/p>\n<\/p>\n During the pandemic, Stanley\u2019s council members started promoting the gopher program more actively. Families come to the municipal office with gopher tails, often by the garbage bag, which are counted on the spot. The kids are given a buck per tail, while the council member whose ward amassed the most tails gets their name on the trophy and bragging rights.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring the COVID shutdown in 2020, that\u2019s when council said, \u2018Let\u2019s make it a fun thing for our kids to do\u2026 to encourage the kids to go outside and be with nature and take care of this problem at the same time,\u2019\u201d Lahaie says. \u201cThe councillors get to have face-to-face interaction with the kids. So it\u2019s an introduction to local government for these kids.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s definitely a good pastime for them to get out and do something practical, rather than sitting inside, doing nothing.\u201d <\/p>\n Brothers Kyle and Cohen Klassen both participate in the program.<\/p>\n \u201cThey can lay the traps. And within a couple of hours, they can often have gophers trapped already, so they check them fairly regularly\u2026 (the gophers) get crushed pretty quick, so it\u2019s very humane,\u201d says their father Gerald. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely a good pastime for them to get out and do something practical, rather than sitting inside, doing nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n Cohen, 14, who\u2019s a wheelchair user, enjoys the challenge. In the winter, he plays para hockey for Team Manitoba. Spring offers the young athlete other ways to stay active, like gopher hunting.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has a very strong upper body and is able to pull himself up onto things,\u201d Gerald says. Cohen mounts and dismounts from his ATV, checking and setting the traps, on his own.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t JOHN WOODS \/ FREE PRESS<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Brothers Kyle (left) and Cohen, with their dad Gerald, are participants in the gopher bounty program.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s great to see him get attached to something and enjoy it\u2026 I\u2019ve never heard him complain about his disability and he finds a way,\u201d Gerald says. \u201cThe (boys) put (the money earned) into an account to gain interest\u2026 they haven\u2019t blown it yet.\u201d<\/p>\n Gerald recalls participating in the program as a kid in the late 1990s, when he also earned a dollar per tail \u2014 \u201cyou would think, with inflation, it should be more,\u201d he jokes. In the late 1980s, tails brought in 25 cents, which was sometimes topped up by the landowner.<\/p>\n While Stanley\u2019s gopher bounty program was started in 1985, it may seem like a throwback to a more formative Prairie era when similar programs proliferated across Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba.<\/p>\n As portrayed and mythologized in films and books like Wolf Willow, Don\u2019t Shoot the Teacher and Who Has Seen the Wind, hunting the \u201csubmarines in the wheatfields\u201d \u2014 as they were referred to in an First World War era anti-gopher campaign \u2014 was once a venerable childhood tradition.<\/p>\n According to Winnipeg biologist and historian Gordon Goldsborough, about 100,000 gopher tails were handed in by Manitoba children during four days of effort in 1917, while in 1919, Manitoba\u2019s boys\u2019 and girls\u2019 clubs snagged nearly 500,000 gopher tails. In 1921, one dogged sportsman set the record for the number of gophers shot in a day: 385.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t JOHN WOODS \/ FREE PRESS<\/p>\n
Despite its periods of excess \u2014 which, ironically, could intensify devastating insect infestations \u2014 the pastime was considered a civic duty. During the 1930s, when severe drought spread across the Prairies and food security was an urgency, it became a critical side hustle.<\/p>\n While in some areas the bounty was a half-penny per gopher tail, the RM of Shoal Lake paid one cent in 1933, while the RM of Glenwood offered the tidy reward of five cents. This extra income could go a long way during the Great Depression.<\/p>\n As the scale of modern farming has ballooned and chemical rodenticides have become more efficient, manual control has diminished, and with them gopher bounty programs.<\/p>\n Today, rodenticides are the dominant method of control. Firmly estimating the number of creatures they kill is almost impossible, partially because so many squirrels die underground, but Hare suggests it\u2019s likely in the millions.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t JOHN WOODS \/ FREE PRESS<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n The RM program yields about 2,500 gophers a year.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the RM of Stanley\u2019s gopher bounty program yields about 2,500 tails a year, Lahaie says.<\/p>\n Apart from its economic benefits, Lahaie also frames the program as a modest counterweight to urban and modern woes.<\/p>\n \u201cKids who hunt and fish don\u2019t mug little old ladies. That\u2019s why we promote hunting and fishing as a great deterrent (and) to get kids into the outdoors and away from the screens,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Hare is fond of quoting a scene from the 1977 Canadian comedy-drama, Don\u2019t Shoot the Teacher, set during the Great Depression.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a classic Prairie film. The school inspector comes by and goes, \u2018That\u2019s not a gopher, that\u2019s a Richardson ground squirrel!\u2019\u2019\u2019 Hare says theatricality. \u201cI just love it.\u201d<\/p>\n While \u201cgopher\u201d has become part of the everyday vernacular, they are not Richardson\u2019s ground squirrels.<\/p>\n \u201cKids who hunt and fish don\u2019t mug little old ladies.\u201d <\/p>\n True gophers \u2014 members of the taxonomic family Geomyidae \u2014 are rodents that predominantly stay underground and look a lot like beavers, to which they\u2019re more closely related than ground squirrels. Richardson\u2019s ground squirrels (Urocitellus richardsonii) are members of the Sciuridae family.<\/p>\n Hare has loose theories about why this accidental naming occurred, but just like calling the koala a \u201cbear,\u201d it\u2019s become stuck in everyday lingo.<\/p>\n Hare will refer to the ground squirrels as gophers colloquially and in the field to make himself understood to farmers, but the confusion grinds his gears a little bit, as they speak to greater misperceptions.<\/p>\n For Hare, it\u2019s not just Prairie wildlife that\u2019s often misunderstood, but also the rural communities that live alongside them.<\/p>\n \u201cAt times, people living in the urban setting forget what it is to really live off the land. (Farmers) are making decisions based on their understanding\u2026 it\u2019s their living, you know?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t JOHN WOODS \/ FREE PRESS<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Cohen Klassen and his brother Kyle work the gopher traps.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Many Manitoba hunters are highly informed about conservation practices. Government wildlife managers consult with both biologists and hunting associations when setting quotas, seasons and control measures, and there\u2019s often an overlap between conservationists and hunters.<\/p>\n \u201cTo me, that\u2019s the sweet spot, really,\u201d Hare says. \u201cYou have some reverence for the life you\u2019re taking to sustain your own\u2026 Hunting is far more in accord with nature than the industrial food processing we have.\u201d<\/p>\n The academic and the practical, the environmental and the economic \u2014 these opposing forces can often create tension throughout the Prairie economy, suggests Colin Penner, a director with Keystone Agricultural Producers.<\/p>\n As an instructor at the University of Manitoba\u2019s school of agriculture and a grain farmer, he says he does his best to balance the relevant priorities.<\/p>\n \u201cRight from the time you put your seed in the ground, or turn out that calf on pasture, there\u2019s something trying to negatively impact it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to think about future generations.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cWe want our crops to succeed. We want our livestock to succeed. And so it\u2019s about how do we remove hindrances, whether it\u2019s too much water or too many gophers, and do it economically?\u201d<\/p>\n Nevertheless, when it comes to ground squirrels, he agrees with Hare that it\u2019s more humane and ecological to engage in ground squirrel control earlier in the season, before mating occurs and juveniles are emerging from their burrows.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to think about future generations, and how we are impacting the land and ecosystems around us,\u201d he says. \u201cSo, how do we navigate all three of these different pillars that sometimes seem at odds with each other?\u201d<\/p>\n Penner\u2019s sensitivity to multiple viewpoints on gophers recalls the end of Calder\u2019s essay.<\/p>\n After quoting Robert Kroetsch\u2019s poem Seed Catalogue \u2014 \u201cHow do you build a prairie town?\u2026 the gopher was the model\u201d \u2014 she suggests the contradictory image of the gopher embodies many of the dominant tensions in the Prairies, over heritage, identity and politics.<\/p>\n \u201cReading the gopher, then, means reading geography, politics, history and culture, and understanding that like the Prairie itself the gopher can mean many things simultaneously,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t JOHN WOODS \/ FREE PRESS<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Cohen Klassen and his brother Kyle work the gopher traps.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cControversy over the gopher is in important ways symptomatic of the ever-present debates within the region over power as manifested in land ownership and the control of prairie space.\u201d<\/p>\n As the Prairies continue to undergo a period of political polarization \u2014 with separatist referendums on the horizon and heated debates about trade and economic diversification, while a bird of prey watches intently from south of the border \u2014 these debates aren\u2019t going anywhere.<\/p>\n We can\u2019t bury our heads in the burrows, but maybe Richardson\u2019s ground squirrel has something to teach us through all this.<\/p>\n winnipegfreepress.com\/conradsweatman<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t Conrad Sweatman Conrad Sweatman is an arts reporter and feature writer. Before joining the Free Press full-time in 2024, he worked in the U.K. and Canadian cultural sectors, freelanced for\u00a0outlets including The Walrus, VICE and Prairie Fire. Read more about Conrad.<\/a><\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJOHN WOODS \/ FREE PRESS <\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tManitoba Agriculture and Immigration pamphlet; Manitoba Legislative Library <\/p>\n
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\n The RM of Stanley\u2019s gopher bounty program started in 1985.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
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