It can be intimidating to watch a gopher digging a hole in your yard and keeping gophers out of your lawn is difficult; it can be frightening to walk outside on a Saturday morning and find eight or ten mounds in your yard, all entry points to the new gopher network that the pests have been burrowing under your yard while you were at work all week.
This fear is one of the reasons that many homeowners bring in a gopher control company to get rid of the pests once they have taken hold. After all, gophers can carry rabies, even if they do not show signs of infection. They will chew through your underground wires for cable television and telephone service, and they’ll gnaw on your water lines. They’ll dig up your sprinkler heads, they’ll chew on the roots of your trees – even to the point where the whole thing will fall to the ground. And if that’s not bad enough, they generally carry a bunch of passengers – fleas, mites, ticks and lice all like to take a ride on gophers, and at any time they can hop off their ride and wander into your house.
Gopher control companies specialize in getting rid of the pests – for good. While a few use poisons, studies have shown that the chemicals only work about one time out of four. The companies that use live-trapping techniques claim a 100% success rate; they will catch the gophers on your land, take them offsite, and then release them into the wild, or they will euthanize them. If you have gophers that have already died, these companies will send personnel to pick up the bodies, clear the smell from the property, and help the owners protect against future leakage.
As with most thing, gopher control prices vary with the seriousness of the infestation. The gopher control staff should show you some preventive measures you can take to keep gophers from coming back again. Some steps to keep them away would include burying hardware cloth vertically around the property line, under a foot-deep trench.
Warranties are hard to come by with gopher control companies, as there are many variables out of the company’s control when it comes to future infestations. However, many companies will offer incremental warranties that offer a percentage off future service that goes down as time passes after the initial service. Be sure to check out the Better Business Bureau ratings of any pest control company that you hire.
