ENCORE: West Des Moines Editor’s Notebook: Is There an Anti-Tomato Hex for Socially Deviant Chipmunks?

I caved. I bought the chipmunks a tomato plant the other day.

I swore off playing at urban farmer after my last few tomato crops were devoured by an exploding chipmunk population. They’re heartless creatures. They wait until the fruit is at its ripe, succulent best, then get up early in the morning and take a big bite. Big Boys, Better Boys, Beefsteaks or Romas – they’re not choosy.

Still, I couldn’t resist the well-established tomato plant at the garden center. I hope the … er, buggers … don’t take this as a sign I want to be pals and will stop calling them bad names. Neither should they let up their guard because I don’t step out the back door and find them in the sights of a .22.

My friend does that.

If I’d been through what she’s been through, animal-lover that I am, I might, too.

Her chipmunks have been as officially diagnosed – or as officially as diagnoses ever get with chipmunks – as social deviants.

This isn’t quackery, but the conclusion of an actual university Extension mammal behavior scientist – a chipmunk head doctor of some sort – she consulted after finding a cache of chipmunk skulls arranged neatly in rows, like trophies, in her basement ceiling.

It’s a long, hilarious story about how she discovered this horror – something to do with the chipmunks hauling in pea gravel for their winter condo and causing a major ceiling cave-in – but the bottom line is this:

“Every species has a social deviant.”

Interesting. Chilling, even.

If there are cannibalistic chipmunks running amuck, should we be gentrifying them by calling them “squinnies?” Isn’t that like calling Charlie Manson something less than a monster?

Squinny isn’t even a real word. Chipmunks are basically rats. They can wreck just as much havoc as they gnaw, rat-like, through wiring and whatever else is in their way. They may be cuter than rats, but they are still rodents.

And remember, Ted Bundy was cute, too. He worked it. That’s why he was able to lure as many as 100 women to their deaths.

Chipmunks work that cuteness, that squinny-esque quality, too. I say, let them.

If it really is a gang of socially deviant, possibly psychopathic chipmunks building who knows what kind of underground fortress where who knows what goes on, it doesn’t seem like a good idea to rile them up. Given what I now know about them, it’s not a stretch to think they’re already giving their winter meals the big come-on, enticing them into their lairs:

Come on in, baby. Sit down and chew on this piece of wire. You can leave any time you want. But before you go, we’d like to have you for dinner.

Then, before the younger, less experienced chipmunks get wise, their captors are doing some ritualistic dance around the heads of their recently devoured bodies.

Yes, given all that, you’ll understand why I’m willing to negotiate.

If they’re willing to break precedent and allow me the first ripe tomato, the kind songs have been written about – “there’s only two things that money can’t buy; that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes” – I’m willing to share the rest of the season’s bounty.

We can coexist.