Badgers? We don't need no stinkin' badgers!

A few years ago I heard a strange news piece about a man who had a vision that he could catch prairie dogs by vacuuming them out of their burrows. According to the story, he converted sewer trucks into an ingenious device for sucking prairie dogs right out of their burrows and into a padded truck to be safely relocated. Ri-ight! It was just the kind of nutty story that gets media coverage and eventually is revealed to be an Urban Legend.

I was reminded of the story recently when moles began ripping up our back lawn. Alas, our standup Oreck vacuum cleaner isn't even the model advertised to pick up bowling balls and it certainly seems insufficient for sucking up burrowing lawn vermin, although I'm confident the sight of me attempting to do so would greatly amuse the neighbors.

It got me wondering, though, whether the prairie dog control folks were still in business. Once again, time for another pointless yet entertaining web search, which shortly yielded some very dated hits about a company called Dog-Gone, including the unforgettable video clip that I recalled from years ago.

OK, so am I the only one who, upon hearing about entrepreneurs who use converted sewer trucks to "humanely" suck prairie dogs, gophers, and other burrowing undesirables from their holes, wonders about their business model?

Maybe that's because I recently saw my boys in a Pied Piper of Hamlin performance at school, and it isn't much of a stretch of the imagination to envision the good folks at Dog-Gone ridding one community of their gopher problem, collecting favorable referrals, then moving on to the next town for a humane release of the relocated critters, and soon beginning an effective advertising campaign with sincere testimonials.

Or maybe I just think too much like The Fix-it-Up Chappie in "The Sneetches," by Dr. Seuss who uses his Star-On and Star-Off machines until he cleans out the town. I can easily envision the Fix-it-Up Chappie with an elaborate Rube Goldberg device for shuttling gophers back and forth between two towns.

I never did find a current web site for the folks at Dog-Gone, so I figured they were long gone themselves, only the data lingering on in cyberspace.

But hey, not so: I tracked down their new phone number and called them. They don't have any trucks servicing California, and they specialize, I was told, in removing "pocket gophers," not moles. They regretted they couldn't help me, but they recommended that I try using those high-frequency, battery-operated devices that emit sounds that might drive the moles away (presumably to some neighbor's yard where they could watch old Hogan's Heroes reruns). They said that method was effective at one of their most recent client sites, a federal penitentiary.

I forgot to ask whether they were called out to vacuum pocket gophers or tunneling inmates.

[Note: for those who see no humor in promoting the gopher-sucking bastards at Dog-Gone, be assured no animals were harmed during the writing and editing of this weblog.]