might have a thing or two to say about that.

God knows the ATF won't have a problem with it in Arizona!

we had trouble a couple of years ago. I just stuck the garden hose down the hole and turned it on. It took a few days of flooding the new tunnels he would dig each night, but he got the message and moved on.

Will they go into a live trap for bait such as bird seed or peanut butter?

What exactly is a gopher, anyway??? We have chipmunks and other species of related ground squirrels here, is that the same thing???

eat the roots of your plants. Where voles destroy by burrowing by, gophers are there for the food.

poured full strength down their holes? http://www.garlicbarrier.com/facts.html

Or a specialized gopher garlic repellent like these:


http://www.gemplers.com/product/151286/Mole-Gopher-Garlic-Repellents

but found this on The Skunk Whisperer website:

http://totalwildlifecontrol.com/critter-facts-control/voles-moles-gophers/

It doesn't sound promising.

Also, even if you could trap it, you would have to destroy it since no one else would be happy to see you relocate in their area (although relocations are rarely successful for the critter, who has to survive in a new territory that it doesn't know). And I agree with you about poisoning---so far, I haven't done that with any problem animals and for the same reasons as you stated as well as making my yard a potential Superfund site.

You may have to hope that natural predation takes care of it for this year and deal with it in the way you plant next year. One thing that I did read is that they "may" move on their own. Yeah, right.

to always build raised beds, and start the bottom with a hardware cloth, 1/4 inch holes in a wire mesh. This is galvanized, should last a while, could overlap a couple pieces and underlay most beds.

http://www.amazon.com/Inch-Mesh-Tall-Hardware-Cloth/dp/B004YSBP8K/ref=sr_1_4?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1340989756&sr=1-4&keywords=hardware+cloth+1%2F4

Oh, and since you asked for "any" advice, don't go near the car very soon after eating a hamburger

My cat sleeps in the garden during the day, which seems to discourage the gophers.

Rather than line my plot with wire, I make little wire cloth boxes just big enough for the root ball when I put the plants in: this discourages the gophers from making off with the whole plant, and the holes are large enough for the roots to grow through.

It liikes to take bites of either red or green tomatoes. We had to fence in the plants to keep the little $#%^$%@#$ out!

You can find them in gardening catalogs. Basically they are battery operated and you stick the end in the ground (even in their runs) and turn them on. About every 20-30 seconds it emits a thump. I am going to have to use several because of the amount of space in my garden. They do work. I like the ones that are tubular, but there are some that have a round top above the stick that holds the batteries. Good Luck.

I can't imagine a big cat in my yard! Stay safe! We had a timber rattler taking a nap at the end of a gopher run next to our front door a couple of days ago! We all ran in the house and watched him from the safety of the window. Beautiful...had about 8 rattles...that would have been deadly.