Since I
found its hide to be of no practical value, I enjoined my troop of Boy
Scouts, a willing group of boys, to carry out my suggestions that they
skin and prepare one of these animals in a stew. Gophers are purely
herbivorous and I thought they should be quite edible, but as I am a
strict vegetarian myself, I had to depend on them to make this
experiment. The boys followed instructions up to the point of cooking,
but by that time the appearance of the animal had so deprived them of
their enthusiasm and appetites that I had no heart to urge them to
continue. I am still of the opinion, however, that to meat-eating
people, the pocket gopher would taste as good as squirrel or pigeon.
The first introduction I had to the devastating work that these animals
can do in an orchard was when I was working among my young apple and
plum trees one spring. I noticed that the foliage was turning yellow on
many of them and upon investigation I found that the trees were very
loose in the ground. At first I thought that planting operations and
heaving of the ground by frost in the spring might be the cause, but in
testing the looseness of one of these trees, I found that I could pull
it out of the ground easily.
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