Farmer finds a way to tame runaway rodent

The rodent, commonly, called Pocket Gophers

The Pocket Gopher, is a burrowing rodent that is mistakenly called a mole locally. It had been a headache for John Lang’at of Kaptumooto village, Narok County, for a long time.

Until recently, the subsistence farmer had been staring at losses caused by the rodent, which lives in underground tunnels and cut roots of crops on Lang’at’s five-acre piece of land.
“This animal was a nuisance to me and a hindrance to my progress,” he says. The rodent, commonly called a Pocket Gopher, digs tunnels underneath the ground where it lives, breeds and even stores its food.

Lang’at says he had suffered huge losses due to the rodent eating the roots of crops. But he can now manage and control the rodent. Armed with a flexible, long stick, a wire and a string acquired from a herbal plant called esubukia in Maasai, the farmer can easily trap the rodent.

He has since managed to reduce the number of Gophers on his farm and saved himself losses and worries. “The rodents had been a nuisance for long until a friend taught me how to trap them,” Lang’at says.

The farmer says he had used all sorts of techniques, including rat poison and scooping using a jembe or shovel, without success. He sets the trap by firmly securing the long stick into the ground and hooking it  face down where the Gopher’s mound is. He ties a thin string next to the tip of the stick. After removing the top soil from the mound, a tunnel heading underground is exposed.

The wire with a knot is positioned at the entrance of the tunnel. The supple string peeled from the herbal plant is also pitched on the ground using an inverted Y-shaped stick.

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With the end of the hole opened, the trap is complete. When air gushes through the opening, a sweet scent from the herbal bark string lures the rodent towards the knot and since it feeds on green vegetation, it will bite the edible string.

The lethal trap will snap and spring up throwing the rodent up and leaving it swinging in the air.
Lang’at is now a happy man, with his crops flourishing without having to worry about the rodent.
“My neighbours sometimes call me to trap rodents for them,” he says.