Propane + Gophers is a Bad Combination

The Calgary Herald said that a massive grass fire near Springbank (west of Calgary) destroyed vehicles and out buildings on the quarter section it burned last weekend. During the fire, radio reports said people were being evacuated from their homes.

The fire starter has confessed. He was trying to eradicate Richardson's ground squirrels (fancy name for prairie dogs, which is the local name for gophers) using a propane torch. This might have been, not a torch, but a commercially available gopher-killing device that mixes propane and oxygen underground, creating a small explosion which reportedly kills the gophers.

Some reports have mistakenly suggested that the device in use was the Gophinator, invented in Saskatchewan. Not true. The Gophinator is a 60 gallon tank of anhydrous ammonia with a long hose and a valve. It asphyxiates the animals by surrounding them with noxious, corrosive gas.

Interestingly, the Gophinator inventors had a hard time getting their simple product to market because it wasn't registered as a pest control device. That was in 1999 - 2000, and I see it's available on the Gophinator website, so it looks like the legal woes might be over.

Both methods sound ghastly from the gopher's point of view, but the propane model seems scary for a dry grassland environment.

The habitat preferred by the Richardson's ground squirrel is... the dry grassland environment.