Gophers

photog_shooter said:
Maybe it's the Inuit mentality in me that I've been raised with, but isn't there a more productive use of the animals after killing them? Like only kill what you eat or need and don't be wasteful? I get it that other animals can and do come along to scavenge the remains, but it still seems like a waste to just go out and kill them for fun.
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There is a difference between gophers and hikhiks. Gophers are too small to eat unless you're starving but they do an immense amount of damage to pastures when left unchecked. When your pregnant heifer steps in a gopher hole and breaks a leg not only are you out the heifer but you are out the calf that you were going to sell. Now hikhiks...you could cook a couple of those little buggers up nicely and they would probably be pretty tasty as well provide a decent meal. I'm thinking something like rabbit.

Neither way is wrong.
 
I have yet to find the remains of one the following day after shooting up a field full of them. Sometimes even an hour or two later. Make your way back out the pasture and the one's you shot on the way in are gone as you make your way out. They are extremely cannibalistic. Several times I have had them run over immediately and start munching on one I just shot. The first time I saw that I thought I was seeing things?! It is especially prevalent when they first emerge in spring before any grasses green up. As for making use of them? No thanks. I'm sure the Duck Dynasty crew would consider it a delicacy but they are nothing like a grey squirrel in my books, which I used to hunt and eat growing up in southern Ontario but gophers just seem like vile little vermin to me best suited to either target practice or just leave them to the hawks. I enjoy sitting back on a hot sunny afternoon and watching the redtail hawks hunt them too.
 
It's been a few years but I have eaten them. They taste like............OK, I'm not going to say they taste like chicken.....BUT they do taste pretty good. I'd eat a rabbit and they eat a lot of the same stuff so why not? Marinade them in red wine or Worschester sauce for a few hours or overnight. BBQ and pepper them and you're good to go. Just the hind quarters though, not much meat on the fronts.
 
photog_shooter said:
I've seen a ton of threads both here and in the rimfire forum about gopher hunting. I was just curious what you guys do with your gophers after you catch them. Do you use the furs, eat them, something else? Tons up here too but I've never really gone after them as I wasn't too sure what to do with them afterwards.
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Comment must be some kind of humor...or from someone who had never shot prairie gophers before...
 
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