Dry ice in an enclosed container is not to be taken lightly. Mythbusters put some in a 2-litre soda bottle and when it burst you didn’t want to be anywhere near the thing.
I imagine a trash can would just pop the lid off before the pressure got very high. I think CO[sub]2[/sub] is heavier than air, so if the wind isn’t too strong you might be able to do it with no lid at all. Just don’t mess around with the stuff without realizing what it can do under the wrong circumstances.
[Bill Murray]“Don’t drive angry. Don’t drive Angry…!”[/Bill Murray]
If you can’t shoot it, I’d go with bludgeoning. Grab a claw hammer and whop him in the head several times.
Why did you live trap him if you want him dead?
I’m sorry dude, that’s a crappy situation, pest control is no fun at all. Good luck and let us know how it turns out.
I catch several of these a year in my yard. I take the trap out to a wooded area and just let him go. The Humane Society is not interested in what to do with the critter; even when I had a racoon in the yard, the attitude of the animal control was that unless I had reason to believe it was rabid, I just had to live with it. (I don’t live in a rural area–I’m less than a block from a major state highway, and there are almost no wooded areas within five miles of me. But I was not going to have a racoon trashing my garden and hissing at my kids every time they went out in the evening)
I have no idea what the legality of releasing it into the wood was, but I had to do something with it, and I figure racoons belong in the woods, so driving five miles up the road and letting him go in the woods was better than killing him (it’s a county park)
picking up the cage with the SOB in it was the hassle–he would thrash around so much that it was impossible to hold the cage by its handle, so my neighbor and I put two broom handles through the bars on the sides and carried it to his truck like we were pall bearers.
I’m not sure relocating to a wooded area is cruel. I live in Jersey, and these things are absolutely everywhere. If there’s so much as a six inch patch of dirt or grass, they find a way to dig it up. I’ve seen them all along the median on the Garden State Parkway, on Golf courses, in the yard of just about everyone I know, as well as out in the county parks. I don’t think there’s many places these things won’t find a way to survive.
Somewhat similar to the dry-ice suggestion, my ex who was a veternary technician said that a humane way to put down mice that are caught live is to put them in bag and then put the bag over the end of a running car’s exhaust pipe. Carbon Monoxide poisoning doesn’t take too long and is humane.
I vote for relocating him! Groundhogs is cute.
I disagree. Not only do they destroy my garden every-freakin’ year, but they small god-awful. One trapped groundhog stinks like the whole Staten Island zoo is in my back yard.
Thanks for the warning. I was already aware of the danger.
I couldn’t fit in the burrow.
I’m not that far from Batsto. I assume your username is a clue as to your location. Want me to drop him off? 
They are cute and also why I didn’t do anything when he was living under my shed. But he decided to upgrade and lives a little too close to the house/porch foundation for my liking.
and attract flies! I had a bit of a fly problem in my kitchen in the summer. I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. I cleaned everything, scoured the yard for a maggot source, cleared out any and all garbage far away from the house… and then I learned that the flies live on the stinky groundhog. They don’t go in his burrow so they just chill out waiting for him to emerge. Unfortunately for them and for their host, I despise flies in my home.
Is it a Nazi groundhog (AIUI, evil goes without saying)?
Check to see if he has a swastika buzzed into his pelt.
Cute? Groundhogs? No, they are vermin by any definition. The bastards undermine foundation walls and raise hob with plantings. They might be alright out in the countryside, in fence rows, tree lots and road ditches but they have no acceptable place in and around buildings, lawns and cultivated fields.
The best thing for one is a quick shot in the ear. Having it in a humane trap just makes that all the easier. When you stick the rifle barrel through the wire mesh they tend to look straight into the barrel – as it trying to figure out what that little hole is all about.
If you don’t have a gun try calling your local police department. Any good officer has a small caliber pistol as a back up gun or just for plunking to stay in training. Any off duty officer would be happy to come over and pop your varmint just for the entertainment.
If you have trapped one groundhog at this time of year it means you have from three to a half-dozen more lurking around. Keep the trap out. A quartered apple makes good bait.
LOL, I was just wondering why you didn’t use a conibear or spring trap as either one would have killed the little booger post-haste. I s’pose they don’t sell that sort of thing in New Jersey though, do they?
I’m full of crap, I just found a couple of places online that sell traps, pretty cheap too. I had to resort to trapping to get a packrat out of my dog house once, used a No. 1 1/2 coil spring trap. It’s designed to get animals by the foot but it snaps packrats across the middle like a revved up regular mouse trap. Worthy purchase if your groundhog woes continue past this guy.
Or you could start a groundhog colony in an enemy’s yard.
Ah.
You suffer the quandry of Wile E. Coyote.
Once you caught him, what the hell to do with him?
Don’t some North American rodents carry Bubonic Plague?
the ones with the plague are on the west side of the country mostly.
slight hijack
Yeah? Then what did you do with the Old Gretna…?
/slight hijack
I’ve never actually had that problem.
I would take him to some woods far, far away and let him go.
Chopper, the easy answer is that in a populated area (meaning almost anyplace) there is too much of a chance that you will catch some animal that you don’t want to hurt – the neighbor’s cat, your own dog – or some critter that you want to stick around. Once you get an animal with a leg-hold or a skull crusher trap there is really no way to take it back. In a humane cage trap you have the option of shooting the little bugger (which is surely more humane that having it eat its leg off) or turning it lose.
The real question is what do you do when you get some beast that is more trouble trapped than free – for instance a skunk. The answer to that one is to have your wife hose the critter down with a garden hose while you administer the coup d’ grace.
For the love of all that’s holy, don’t use a shotgun. Too expensive. Too messy.