When you’re overrun with ground squirrels, you have a few choices on how you get rid of them:
1. Poison.
2. Flooding/drowning.
3. Fumigation, eg, using auto exhaust down the hole.
4. Blasting, per the above.
5. Shooting, but this is viable control only if you have a LOT of time.
I’ve had to kill THOUSANDS of ground squirrels on a hay farm, sometimes as many as 800 per season. Their reproductive rate is prodigious and they’re rather destructive.
Squirrels are nothing more than rats with a good PR department.
Back before color TV, Computers. Video games, Pong and SUVs the young Bender Family would put 5 gallons of Hi Test in the 54 Chevy, load the two kids in the back seat, the Hi Standard K100 9 shot 22 under the seat with 100 rounds of hollow points and head east to Kneeland Prairie and take turns killin Digger Squirrels on the cattle ranches along the county road. Good memories but no photos...