no respect for the golden gopher in CA

okay if your from the midwest, you're aware that a pair of gopher feet will bring you a 50 cent reward from county Ag dept. As the ditches were full of them and the ditch mowers took a beating from them, it was an incentive program started to encourage help in ridding the county of the varmints.. (it might have been 25 cents as Gregs memory is fading over 30 years since his last collected bounty) .. Our nephew Philip uses his gun to pick them off and continue to collect... well we at one time in our CA. backyard had we kept our gopher feet from the number of gophers we hunted and put them in a box and turned them in ourselves and than started a CD at the bank ~ we would now be rich. But like stocks that get away, we never did.. but our yard has been free of them for a looooooong time due to the diligence of our Symens men in pursuing them.

Today our sons were doing the yard work together and found a gopher hole deep in the back of our yard. So Brian did the old trick taught to him by his father of sticking the water hose into the hole and turning it on... oops he left the 3rd garage door open and it was pretty quick that he had a gopher up and out of the hole and on the run... straight into this open garage.. with Brian in hot pursuit and grabbing a leveling rake at the entrance to this garage. As he ran he hooked the gopher and swung him out of the garage and onto the yard... whew... thankfully he didn't get beyond where Brian could grab him and to take up residence in our storage garage.. he than grabbed this hard tonged rake and raised it to knock the stunned gopher over the head, but in mid swing the gopher took off again and he swung the rake like a polo mallet (this coming from Shanes rendition) and in the swing ................. hit dead center ~ dividing the body of the lofted animal mid air and and as it floated over his head Shane was splattered wildly with all that was fluid within this animal and he said it was absolutely GROSS..

Now, I have a sick cell phone picture of the corpse, but to protect us from PETA you are going to be left with only words for legal reasons.. to protect the hunter from any litigation as to any harm that MIGHT have come to the decendant...