At the risk of becoming unpopular, I have a confession – I like gophers. I spent a few years of my childhood living on a military base outside of Medicine Hat where they have more gophers than tumbleweeds (and they've got a lot of tumbleweeds). Seeing the baby gophers come popping out of their holes in the springtime was one of my favourite things.
I was ridiculed by my classmates for my editorial in the school paper discussing my theory on why boys in my grade hated gophers so much (because the girls thought the gophers were cuter than they were). The boys doing the ridiculing were also the ones who would spend their recesses crouched over gopher holes with homemade nooses, waiting for the creatures to poke their heads out to begin a rigorous and disgusting 15 minutes of torture before the school bell rang again, so I didn't feel too badly about being mocked for my passionate defence of them.
When the RCMP Musical Ride came to town and I found my principal out on the football field preparing for it by dumping loads of dirt down the gopher holes, my shock and horror was only abated by repeated reassurances that the gophers would find other ways out or dig free in a few hours, and not die a terrible death of being buried alive. Even to this day I'm not sure whether that was true or not, and I hesitate to Google it for fear of what I'd find.
When I found out the government sanctioned full-scale gopher slaughter with poisons, bullets, or, in some notable places, traps and eventual clubbing, there aren't words for my level of disillusionment with the world at large.
I took a course on environmental ethics in university and one of the most notable things my professor said was that as a culture, we abhor the slaughter of the cute and fuzzy while every day overlooking the killing of less adorable creatures. That's why the death of one endangered whale creates outrage while whole species of slugs are wiped out for dams and other urban infrastructure and no one even notices. I'm not sure where gophers fall on the scale, because they're pretty cute and fuzzy, but they're also sort of a plague, overtaking the prairie with dangerous holes that harm horses and livestock, and probably ruin crops too.
The worldwide outrage over the Canadian seal hunt is well-known. There was similar outrage over the recent slaughter of hundreds of sled dogs in British Columbia after the sled dog business began to dry up after the Olympics. Every day, there are more stories of dogs found abused and left to die in garbage dumpsters, or tortured to death as a form of revenge after the end of a relationship.
In Canada, we pride ourselves on being nice to each other, polite to our neighbours, and even reasonably cordial to our enemies. Maybe we should try to be nice to our animals too – even the ones that drive us crazy darting in front of our cars on the highway.
After all, no one deserves to die suffocating and in terrible agony, terrified and hiding in their underground home. Not even a gopher.
Happy Animal Cruelty Prevention Month.
