Farmers hate groundhogs. I believe this began many, many, many years ago. It was when farmers first attached plows to horses and that first nasty incident occurred. Some poor horse put one moving leg inside a groundhog hole and it broke that leg. For those of you who don’t know, a horse with a broken leg almost always needs to be put down. So that early farmer was left without an animal to pull the plow.
Thus the long hatred began. While it’s true that farmers only rarely use horses to plow anymore, those groundhog holes can still do a number on a tractor or its many attachments. So farmers still hate groundhogs.
And maybe farmers would have wiped out groundhogs by now. But an odd spectacle called Groundhog Day began and suddenly some groundhogs were protected by other humans. Just to see if the animal saw its shadow on February 2nd.
It might seem like all you need is one groundhog. But the truth is, to have one successfully bred groundhog in perpetuity, you need many living groundhogs.
And Wiarton Willie, the Ontario, Canada groundhog is by preference white and therefore an albino. While the managers of this groundhog had been successful with having albino groundhogs for many years, last year they didn’t have a white groundhog and Willie was a normal brown groundhog. Still they are on the lookout for a white groundhog and if one is found, current Willie won’t last as the lead groundhog for life. He will be shamelessly replaced by any albino that is found.
Of course for one albino in a set of groundhogs to occur, you usually need thousands of groundhogs. That means that Wiarton Willie organizers, if they can get back to having an albino groundhog, are responsible for thousands of ground hogs being alive. These organizers are the antithesis of the farmer exterminators.
Naturally the farmers are angry and have been trying to usurp the pseudoscience of groundhog day with the pseudoscience of the Farmer’s Almanac.
The primary difference between the two is that Groundhog Day uses only one pseudo science and predicts the start of spring whereas the Farmer’s Almanac uses many pseudosciences to predict the entire winter season’s weather.
Who will win the epic battle of prognostication? The farmers or the groundhogs? We might never know for sure with such things as the end of winter being such a vaguely defined term.
