To Kill or Not to Kill?

   As of May, I "own" a lawn, a front one and a back one, in fact. As of August, a gopher has laid claim to the front lawn, and where there was once a green, lush, unmarred bed of grass, there is now the construction of an elaborate gopher mansion with brown mounds of dirt strategically placed to get the choicest grubs. This gopher had no permits, no land title, no consideration of how its presence would affect me. It has taken something that I was proud of and killed it aesthetically (kind of like how strip malls have killed the beauty of the natural landscape). This miscreant gopher has strip malled my front lawn. 

    When I saw the first mound, I didn't think it was a big deal. It was just an animal trying to survive. I believe in coexistence; I could handle one mound. When I saw the second mound, I did what any person would do in a crisis; I turned to Google. Google gave me lots of options which seemed to favor non-lethal methods of extraction. Upon the appearance of the third mound, I was convinced that the gopher encroachment merited death, and I did not appreciate Google implying that killing it was the least desirable option. 

    At the hardware store, my former student Josie was working. She guided me to the gopher remedy aisle. All of the ultrasonic emitters were sold out. "Gophers have been a major problem this summer," Josie said. "My mom uses these poison peanuts. You just find its burrow put them in there, and they eat them. My mom uses the whole bottle."

   "So what do you do then? You have to dig up a dead body?" I asked. Images of a furry corpse flashed in my mind. Then images of a furry corpse suddenly coming alive and attacking my face burned legitimate fear into my imagination.

"You just take a plastic bag and wrap it up and throw it away," she said nonchalantly, like disposing of a body was as common as washing dishes. I shuddered at the thought of picking up a lifeless, little animal that I had murdered. My heart broke when birds would fly into the grill of my pickup. I had months of guilt when I hit a buck which had demolished the front end of my vehicle. I root for the squirrels to get across the road before the cars hit them and get incredibly irritated with them when they seem intent on killing themselves under the wheels of my car. Don't they value their lives! There was a dead raptor in my shed in the back yard which I would have nothing to do with and would still be there if my friend had not disposed of it. I am not a big fan of death. I don't have any weird delusions about it; I know that it is a part of the natural order of the universe; I know the meat I eat had to be killed;  I just don't want to be the one taking life and having to dispose of the evidence. 

"Is it bad to murder it?" I asked my student. She shrugged her shoulders, obviously not that interested in my moral crisis. "They are bad this year. My mom kills them," she responded. 

I bought the poison peanuts. 

As soon as I had planted the seeds of death, I stood back, and observed the mounds. The top of one began to move! It was the gopher! "He is eating the peanuts," I thought, and then a far too happy chant began synchronizing with my murderous plan in my head. Eat the peanuts. Eat the peanuts. Eat the peanuts. Eat the peanuts.

It is two weeks later, and the gopher has not eaten the peanuts. In fact, just this evening, I planted more in what is now a city of mounds. In the process of trying to take this critter's life, and as I was digging around in the soil, I couldn't help but ask myself what the point of it all was. Why was I so angry at this creature who has found a prime piece of real estate and is being well-fed? Why is the lawn so important to me? Am I more concerned about how the lawn looks more than anything else? Is this a good reason to kill a gopher, which seems too smart to actually die? Am I thinking too much about this act that people do commonly without guilt? How important is aesthetics? 

  I don't want the gopher to die. I am partly glad my attempts to kill it have not been successful, but I also don't want the places that I consider beautiful, and the first place I see as I walk out in the morning, to be destroyed. Perhaps aesthetics trumps my morality in this case, and that leaves me a little unsettled.