Author says that despite animals’ tendency to dig up lawns, they should be left alone

Moles are antisocial, horribly violent, terrible parents and could not care less about your garden, but a former mole catcher has called on people to leave the creatures alone.

Marc Hamer was once the only mole catcher in south Wales and for years killed them professionally and, he stressed, humanely.

But he no longer kills them and nor should they be killed, he told Hay festival. “Moles used to be trapped in their tens of thousands; there have been mole catchers around since Roman times, but these days they are not caught so much so the population is absolutely astonishing.

“But it doesn’t matter that it’s astonishing, let them carry on with their lives, we don’t need to catch them.”

If moles are digging up your lawn then grow a wildflower meadow, he said.

Having said that, “they are horribly vicious”, he admitted. “If you pick one up, it will hiss and snarl; they are incredibly violent creatures. They don’t even like each other very much.”

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He said moles were solitary creatures who lived in tunnel systems. “If another mole comes into it, they will fight to the death. They are nothing like [the character] Mole in [The] Wind and the Willows at all … they are vicious.”

Hamer said a mole’s paws were stronger than human hands. “Their strength is phenomenal. If I picked a live mole up – at that time I spent every day of my life working a spade, so my hands were very strong – it could quite easily burst open my hands and fall out.”

Moles, who eat their body weight in worms every 12 hours, are also lousy parents, he said. Hamer said baby moles, called kits, were forced out early. “Moles are not very friendly creatures at all and after a few weeks the mother kicks them out. She pushes them to the surface, to the ground, and seals the door up after them and that’s it, she doesn’t have anything to do with them ever again.”

Hamer was discussing his book How to Catch a Mole: And Find Yourself in Nature in which he recounts a life in which he fell in love with nature while sleeping rough, before becoming a mole catcher.

He was on stage at Hay with David Barrie, a former diplomat and director of the Art Fund who has written a book on the navigational skills of animals, such as dung beetles steering the dung balls they roll to the light of the Milky Way.

Barrie was asked about the declining navigational skills of humans and the increasing reliance on aids such as Google Maps.

“It is very sad and it’s dangerous,” he said, pointing to how some people use it up mountains and out to sea.

“As we become more and more dependent on these electronic gadgets to move around, we’re becoming more and more cut off from the natural world. If you outsource your navigational abilities to an electronic device, you’re cutting yourself off from the world around you.

“There may be deeper problems too because the parts of your brain that are responsible for your ability to navigate need exercise and if they’re not exercised they literally shrink. It is quite possible that people who fall victim to Alzheimer’s disease … will have considerably less resilience to cope with the onslaught of the disease.”