Our back five acres looked like a Martian landscape. Gophers, customarily active in fall and spring, followed their genetic programming and engineered tunnel after tunnel. Each critter created multiple large mounds, littering the property with huge piles of dirt.Okay, I confess I sort of liked the “free” dirt. Scooped up and redistributed to the sundry bare spots and depressions around the homestead, it was expedient and practical. But unless you harvest the dirt every day, it quickly ages and ¬turns hard. Scooping it up then is real work, so I’m not a huge fan.The only option to shoveling the gopher’s handiwork into the wheelbarrow is to level and rake-flat each fresh mound. That method unfortunately has the same expiration date: if you don’t follow-up daily, the mounds turn solid. Really solid -- like the consistency of cheap concrete.Moving was a tempting but impractical option, so I resorted to trapping the little bas**ards. Over the years we used “Victor” gopher traps with spotty success. My wife was more patient in placing the trap than I, so her success rate was better than mine. Still, I doubt we ever caught the culprit more than 20% of the time.Executing my due diligence, I researched “how to kill gophers” far and wide. At one point, I was converting an old lawnmower to route the exhaust and pump it into the ground. The theory was the carbon monoxide would improve on the Victor’s 80% failure rate. Turns out the connections involved (think red hot surfaces) was more complicated than I expected. Go figure -- no one sells plumbing to connect a lawnmower muffler exit port with a long, flexible, skinny, heatproof tube. Imagine that.Next, I briefly considered the “Rodenator” until I discovered the cheap models were over $1000 and the better models sold for several times that. The idea was incredibly appealing: pump acetylene and oxygen into the gopher hole, ignite it, and say sayonara to both gopher and tunnel. I even fleetingly considered a poor man version where I would purchase a cutting torch to obtain industry-standard (read: safe) fittings to connect the tanks and mix the gasses. Yes, I even found a way to remote-detonate the gasses from a safe distance: a small chunk of steel wool lodged between both prongs of an electric extension cord. Connect the other end to a car battery and whallah, instant ignition. Seriously: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.Happily I opted for cheaper solutions that were coincidentally less likely to bring me to the attention of those fun people at Homeland Security. (“Yeah, we need the cops out here right now. There’s somebody blowin’ up stuff right next door!”)Well, okay, this is Texas, so the neighbors response would have more likely run along the lines of, “Hey, that’s awesome! Can I borrow it for my niece’s birthday party next week?” Still, I was hoping for something more practical and less likely to result in tissue damage. I mean, after all, I would have ended up owning a cutting torch, so I’m sure I would have eventually found something large and metallic that needed cutting…Next stop: Amazon.com. I ordered a “death clutch” gopher trap figuring that just looking at the thing would cause gopher cardiac arrest, cause that was the effect it had on me. This wicked-looking medieval contraption had a reputation for success. No idea if that reputation was well-deserved as I could never get it to work. I bought it knowing in advance from Amazon reviewers that it would arrive sans directions. As suggested, I watched numerous YouTube videos about how to arm it. I’ll confess I never did figure out how to set the trap, at least partially because I was so afraid of the sucker. After one valiant final attempt (I think I twisted the spring the wrong way) I gave up and threw it away. God help anyone rummaging through my dumpster this week.I gave Amazon.com one final try and discovered the “Cinch” trap. Huge, goofy looking thing, but people swore by it rather than at it. From the level of on-line praise it garnered, you’d think it was a religious cult rather than a varmint catching apparatus. Well, this being Texas, kinda hard to tell the difference sometimes.It arrived factory-fresh, complete with a manufacturing defect. Sigh. That certainly took the bloom off the rose. When the jaws closed, they touched. In other words, they aligned perfectly, creating an artistic, but decidedly un-lethal loop rather than the gopher-squeezing action I was looking for. A very long (15 minute) YouTube video confirmed what I had guessed: I’d have to bend the jaws in opposite directions. That accomplished, it works fine.Actually, fine is an understatement. Once I got comfortable arming this gadget (the second arming wire exerts much less tension on the trigger than expected, but it still works fine) I’ve had 100% success: Locate tunnel within gopher mound, insert trap, remove dead gopher. Only down side is that it sometimes does not kill instantly, so I have to check the traps frequently in order to humanely dispatch my former enemy. Feral cats are the beneficiaries of my newfound trapping expertise, a reward for their eliminating other rodents, which helps discourage rattlesnakes. That’s a win-win-win in my book, though I’m not sure the gophers would agree.I can’t bring myself to give this amazing device any les than five stars. It’s simply the best gopher trap I’ve ever used. The medium size trap work great on Texas gophers. If you have smaller gophers or moles, you’ll likely want the smaller size. Frankly, if it rusts too badly, I’ll simply buy another one. Yes, it works that well. Despite needing modification before it would work, and despite the extra time to patrol the trap more frequently to make sure the gopher doesn’t suffer, I still have to give this incredible device five stars. Nope, I don’t have a single shred of connection to the manufacturer, I’m just a wildly loyal fan. This device has my highest recommendation!