When your lawn gives way beneath your foot and you fall and snap your anterior cruciate ligament and/or break your hip you might think that moles are better off in meadows and heathlands rather than suburban gardens.
😲
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Hmm. I'm a sceptic when it comes to wildlife in all its forms. Rats. Vine weevil. There's black spot and honey fungus, Japanese knotweed and mares tail. Potato blight. Chafer grubs. Horse flies. It's all wildlife but I don't want it in my garden. I'm with Dove on the broken bones, too.
In some gardens they aren't a huge problem, especially if next to fields etc, because they often keep to a specific 'line' and don't cause any real trouble, but once it becomes more than that, they can be a major problem, for the reasons described.
I am reluctant to define humans as Nature's pests. That is a narrow and unhelpful view of a complex situation. We are the product of nature, and can scarcely help ourselves, any more than moles. The idea that we can stand aside from our natural selves and act, consciously, on the environment is startlingly new and by no means universal.
Not startingly new! A Greek philosopher said in 450BC that the goal of life was living in agreement with nature.
The Aborigines in Oz have been doing it for millennia as have the Bushmen in the Kalahari. American Indians north and south also know about balancing their need to hunt, fish and grow food with the needs of the environment. It is the more voracious white hoomans who rape and pillage with nary a thought for the consequences.
Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
"The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
Many human populations in 'undeveloped' parts of the world do in fact live hand-in-hand with the local ecology, so much so that many of them consider nature to be 'god' and their role is to tend nature as god's helpers. The problem we have now is that word 'developed', which is just a euphemism for most of us now living lives which bear no relation to the past and we are all constantly 'nudged' to believe a consumer-based society based on unlimited growth is somehow normal for humans. It isn't. For heaven's sake, in the middle of a global pandemic, we talk about 'the economy' as if that is somehow important to the planet and not the artificial construct it actually is. The 'economy' is a lunatic which has taken over the asylum and is a monster which can no longer be contained.
Don't ask me what the alternative so-called 'lifestyle' is, because we have now gone too far with this model and there is no longer an 'acceptable' alternative.
Sorry about te rant, I shall change my name to "Private Frazer" forthwith.
A trowel in the hand is worth a thousand lost under a bush.
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Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
@Posy- you missed lily beetles from your list
I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
The Aborigines in Oz have been doing it for millennia as have the Bushmen in the Kalahari. American Indians north and south also know about balancing their need to hunt, fish and grow food with the needs of the environment. It is the more voracious white hoomans who rape and pillage with nary a thought for the consequences.