After Washington Forbids Animal Traps, Mountains Of Molehills Make It Reconsider

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.

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.

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."

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."

Re:#7 You might have something here. If rurals worked the system to have these urban-suburban voters take the consequences of their envirowacko supporting votes and contributions, they might do some thinking and less "feeling" next time at the polls.

Notice the media bias in this article? Blaming those nasty Republicans, who are merely trying to look out for their rural constituents, too.

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.

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.

They should try what my Grandpa use to do. Watch the yard from the front porch and shoot the bastards with 12 ga. OO buckshot. Grandma had to put a stop to it when he shot out the tire of the Chevy....

There was a similar measure on the ballot in Oregon in November 2000. Fortunately, in Oregon, the voters had the good sense to reject it.

Where do you take the live animal that you have trapped?

My ex used to have an affection for rodents. She kept rats (which actually make good pets).

Anyway, we developed a mouse problem and she insisted that we get those st00pit live traps, which were causing me to spend a great deal of my free time driving mice to wooded areas to let them go (where they would probably just find another house to chew up).

When she wasn't around and I would just flush them down the toilet.

what's wrong with Hav-A-Hearts

And then what ? drown them? pound them with a hammer ? or turn them loose on someone else's turf ?

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