WSJ on trying to get rid of moles in your lawn.
January 22, 2002
After Washington Forbids Animal Traps,
Mountains of Molehills Make It Reconsider
By ROBERT GAVIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
OLYMPIA, Wash. -- When Washington state voters
banned fur trapping, the idea was to spare animals from
cruelty. Little did they know they also were sparing one
animal that many gardeners and lawn-lovers agree
deserves to die by whatever means necessary: the
mole.
Washington's Initiative 713, passed in November 2000,
with 55% of the vote, bans the use of "body-gripping
traps" on "nonhuman vertebrates." While the law
created exceptions for mice and rats, it overlooked one
other pest. The result: A scissors-like trap, an
extremely effective means for eliminating moles, has
been outlawed, too.
Now moles are popping up everywhere, digging up
parks and yards with seeming impunity. The green
plains of Marymoor Park in Redmond, east of Seattle, have been transformed into a Himalayas of molehills.
In Snohomish, a well-to-do town north of Seattle, Richard Lund has watched his manicured half-acre turn
into a moonscape dotted with nearly 60 molehills. Mr. Lund, who used to hire a trapper at the first sign of
mole activity, has turned to smoke bombs and a battery-powered sonic device that promises to blast the pests
from their holes. But as the tube-like device emits its series of noises -- sounding strangely like snickering --
the molehills grow higher. "My yard looks like Mount Rainier," says Mr. Lund.
On a Mission
Homeowners are growing desperate. They're pouring gasoline, castor oil and their own urine into mole
tunnels, flooding them with garden hoses and inserting chewing gum, said to be both irresistible and lethal to
moles because it supposedly either chokes them or blocks their digestive systems. At Del's Farm Supply in
Monroe, an exurb northeast of Seattle, manager Jeff Groves reports that customers dissatisfied with smoke
bombs that emit suffocating sulfur dioxide gas are now grabbing handfuls of road flares to toss into mole
tunnels. "They are definitely on a mission," says Mr. Groves.
Behind this mole invasion lies a political disagreement that has spawned other unwanted proliferation of
wildlife. In 1996, the Humane Society of the United States, which pushed the Washington initiative,
persuaded voters in Massachusetts to pass a similar antitrapping law. The state's beaver population exploded
to an estimated 63,000 in 2001, from about 22,000 in 1996, creating flooding problems with beaver dams,
according to wildlife officials. Beaver complaints more than quadrupled, to 650, in 1999, leading the
Massachusetts Legislature the next year to amend the law to allow local authorities to issue special permits
for body-gripping traps to dispose of problem beavers.
"Traditionally, we managed beaver [with a three-month trapping
season] as a valuable natural resource," says Rob Deblinger,
assistant director for wildlife in the Massachusetts Division of
Fisheries and Wildlife. "Now it's a pest. It's treated like a pest,
trapped like a pest and thrown away."
Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of the Humane Society in
Washington, D.C., says voters in Arizona, California and
Colorado approved similar antitrapping initiatives in recent years,
and those states haven't seen sharp rises in animal problems. He
says wildlife-agency officials in Washington state and Massachusetts are sympathetic to hunters and trappers
and are hyping animal nuisances as a way to undermine support for antitrapping laws. The initiative passed
by Washington voters, for example, is clearly aimed at fur, not mole trapping, but wildlife officials
nonetheless interpreted the law to include the yard pests, says Mr. Pacelle. "This is a politically driven issue."
In Washington, Lt. Steve Dauma, problem wildlife coordinator in the state Fish and Wildlife Department's
enforcement program, says the agency is merely following the "plain language of the law," which bans
body-gripping traps and doesn't exclude moles from the ban. So far, nobody has been prosecuted for illegal
mole trapping, which carries penalties of as much as $5,000 in fines and a year in jail, but several warnings
have been issued, says Lt. Dauma.
Destroying Landscaping
Ranging from five to 10 inches in length and weighing from about two to six ounces, moles are equipped
with powerful flipper-like forelegs that let them burrow as deep as five feet from the surface to devour
worms, insects and larvae. Since a mole needs to consume half or more of its weight in bugs each day to
survive, a single adult foraging for food can destroy thousands of dollars of landscaping in a couple of days.
They're a particular problem in the coastal Northwest because of its conducive mild, soggy climate.
Moles' handiwork can drive some suburbanites to an obsession comparable to Ahab's search for the White
Whale, says Patrick Thompson, a West Linn, Ore., entomologist who wrote "Of Moles and Men: The Battle
for the Turf," a book published last year.
"Moles have no redeeming value," says Lorraine Luschen, a 70-year-old real-estate agent who lives in
Snohomish. Ms. Luschen, who describes herself as an otherwise gentle person who leaves out food for
neighborhood cats and dogs, recently took to flooding mole holes and beating the escaping animals with her
garden hose, because, she explains, "I didn't have a chain saw."
The mole has its champions. Barbara Freeman, a zoology professor at the University of Nebraska, in Lincoln,
calls moles vital to the health of the ecosystem, sparing plants and people from insect infestations. "I don't
think we have a clue what would happen if we killed the predators of insects," she says, "but I know I don't
want to test the system."
Burning Lawn
Many homeowners are willing to chance a world without moles. Kelli Larson, who owns the Mole Patrol
Inc., a mole-control company in Bothell, a Seattle suburb, recalls that one man set fire to his lawn after
pouring gasoline down the tunnels and lighting it. A suburban woman, upon hearing that urine might drive
away moles, saved hers to pour down the holes, says Ms. Larson.
In Startup, a small town northeast of Seattle, Gary Nordquist turned to explosives. Last summer, after failing
to drive his moles out by piping car exhaust into their holes, Mr. Nordquist tried mole mines fashioned from
pill bottles, gunpowder and nine-volt batteries. The devices were designed to blow up on contact with a mole.
"Every time I heard one go off, I jumped and whooped," says Mr. Nordquist.
The best hope for halting the mole madness may be the Washington Legislature, which has been asked --
with the Humane Society's blessing -- to exclude moles from the trapping ban. Last year rural Republicans
blocked the move, claiming a double standard that would allow wealthy suburbanites to trap moles but
prevent ranchers from trapping coyotes preying on livestock. The bill may have a better chance this year,
because more sympathetic Democrats have taken control of the legislature.
Until lawmakers act, Mr. Nordquist, the mole bomber, has become somewhat more philosophical about the
advancing armies of moles that dug up his yard. After a heavy rain last fall, he noticed that molehills slowed
runoff, thus helping to prevent erosion. "I had to find a use for them," he says, "so I could live with them."
Write to Robert Gavin at robert.gavin@wsj.com
Copyright © 2002 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
