THE MOLE QUESTION

As to whether the mole is injurious or not, the farmer appears not yet to have made up his mind. Mole clubs flourish throughout the country, which fact may be taken by some as proof that the creature is regarded as an enemy. Is it so? There are many farmers who subscribe to the local mole club, and occasionally have their grounds cleared, yet they say that they do not know that they are doing themselves any good, some are even inclined to think that it would perhaps be better to leave the moles alone. They go on subscribing to clubs in the same way that so many of us give our crowns or half-guineas year by year for objects we care nothing about, and do not know whether they are good or bad. All the other farmers in the place have paid their subscriptions, and Jones gives his so as not to be set down as a mean or singular person, and because it would be a bother to have any controversy over the subject. The others have probably subscribed for the same poor reason.

Occasionally we meet a farmer who is quite positive on one side or the other; he knows all about it, and is angry with his neighbours either because they do or do not kill their moles. There are always a few extremists. Every one has heard of Mr. Joseph Nunn, who maintains that the sparrow is the farmer’s best feathered friend, and is carried by his zeal to the length of declaring that all those who shoot the sparrow ought themselves to be shot. I hear of another farmer who buys moles from mole-catchers to put on his land; he is convinced that their presence is wholly beneficial, that when those inhabiting the lands adjoining his farm have been killed off, his own moles flow out into these depleted grounds to enjoy the greater abundance of food they find there; and it is to make good this loss inflicted on him by the ignorance and stupidity of his neighbours that he is obliged to act as he does.

Recently I was with a man who takes the opposite view; one who revolves schemes and projects for the suppression of the mole. This enemy of the mole is in possession of three or four water-meadows, infested by these animals to an extraordinary degree. As he is partly dependent for a livelihood on a few milch-cows he keeps, the condition of this meadow land is a matter of importance to him; and he has come to the conclusion that he loses a large portion (a fourth, he imagines) of his grass crop on account of the uneven condition of the surface caused by the moles. It is true that he could roll the ground, and it would then probably be in a sufficiently level state at the next grass-cutting for the scythe, but by the following season it would again be in a hummocky condition, and repeated rollings would be a serious item in his expenses. He considers that if the damage thus inflicted on him in these small meadows where the scythe is used is sufficient to be seriously felt, the loss must indeed be great on large farms where the machine is used for mowing, and the ground must be kept in a smooth condition at considerable expense.

Pondering over these things, and fighting the moles, which, not content with making a sort of physical geography raised map of his little grass meadows, nightly invade his garden to spoil his work there, he has come to look upon it as a tremendously important question. It is his conviction that he who invents a means of suppressing the mole will be a great benefactor to the country, and he has set himself to find out the means, and he has even strong hopes of success. So long (he argues) as we continued to fight the moles with the traps now in use, made to take one mole at a time, the very utmost we can do is to keep their numbers down with a great deal of trouble and at a considerable expense. They increase rapidly, and no sooner are our efforts relaxed than they again become abundant. We want a trap that will not take a single mole but as many moles as are accustomed to use the run in which it is placed. That a large number do constantly use the same main road by which they migrate from one hunting-ground to the other is to him a settled fact. One of his neighbours took thirty-two moles, one by one, in the course of a few days in a single trap placed at the same place in a run--a proof that all the moles in the place that range any day over an area of many acres have roads that are free to the colony. All we have got to do, then, is to find one of these principal roads, usually at the side of a hedge, and to place a trap capable of holding as many moles as may come into it, and the thing is done.

To inform my rural friend that he was not the first person to have great dreams anent the mole question, I related to him the history of the famous Henri le Court, described by Bell in his _British Quadrupeds_ as “a person, who having held a lucrative situation about the Court at the epoch of the French Revolution, retired from the horrors of that fearful period into the country, and there devoted the remainder of his life to a study of the habits of the mole, and of the most efficient means for its extirpation.”

It surprised him to hear that men of brains had begun to occupy themselves with this question as long ago as the eighteenth century; but the thought that nothing important had resulted from their efforts in so long a time did not discourage him: it was simply the case that, brains or no brains, he had been so lucky as to hit upon the one efficacious means for the extirpation of the mole, which all before him had missed--to wit, _his_ trap.

This frightful engine of destruction is not yet perfected, and perhaps the moles need not be in a hurry to say their prayers. In the meantime, while the farmers are waiting to be delivered from their subterranean enemy, I cannot help thinking that it is not much to the credit of the science of agriculture, and the Royal Agricultural Society, that some practical steps have not been taken before now to ascertain whether or not the mole is an injurious beast; or, to put it differently, whether the direct loss he causes by throwing up hills in meadows and grass-lands exceeds any benefit that may result from his presence in draining and ventilating the soil and in clearing it of grubs.

With gardens and lawns we are not concerned; moles are a nuisance when they come too near, and if some one could devise a means to inflict sudden death on every underground intruder into such places it would be a great advantage. Experiments in a small way could be made at a very slight cost. For instance, take a meadow, like one of those belonging to my friend, very much infested with moles; divide it in two equal portions, one half to be open to moles, the other half to be strictly protected from them by means of a fence of fine wire-netting sunk to a proper depth in the soil. Then let the grass crops of the two portions be compared as to weight and quality for a period of four or five years. Such an experiment carried out by a number of farmers at the same time in different parts of the country would probably result in the settlement of this old vexed question.