Groundhogs Anyone?

Ok, so we all know that in England the WSS are not just bird-dog hunters, they are also allowed to hunt small game, usually hare as the preferred choice. In my neck of the woods there is certainly no dearth of rabbits to go chase after-they scatter whenever we pull the cars up the driveway towards twilight. But, most of them have discovered that a pack of baying Welshies careening out of the house into the yard does not really speak well for their longevity. Instead, they've learned that it's just safer to eat my daylily garden outside the fenced yard. Dagnabit-sometimes I feel like Elmer Fudd trying to catch 'That Wabbit' eating his carrots out of the garden! Really-if I don't take a picture of a daylilly in bloom in the morning, by night there will be no flower, no buds, and half the leaves will be eaten away. We keep spraying with 'critter repellent'  and put down those hot pepper granules, but when the critters are hungry, the heat from the capsicum is just like red pepper flakes on a pizza, I guess.

Anyway, as the title of this post hints, the newest fun for the Welshies is to go exploring for groundhogs. Around here, these nasty creatures, are also known as woodchucks or land-beavers and are vectors for rabies and harbor ticks infected with Lyme's disease. They  are inveterate diggers and have set up a warren of holes surrounding my fenced yard-I've even found a hole coming INTO the backyard. We finally got the four-foot chain link fence repaired in the yard after the storm damage, but it has now proven to be such an enabler of the Welshie's natural agility that three of the dogs (Remy, Kian and Cody) don't even think twice about hoisting themselves over the fence to explore the outlying groundhog burrows just off our property line. They don't go far away, but they sure do develop a listening problem when we want them to come back into the yard...So we're limiting the use of the backyard to when there are two of us to monitor fence-jumpers.

We've put 50 lb rocks over the holes into the yard, we've filled the burrows with gravel and branches, cement blocks and bricks. Nothing really seems to keep them out-they redig or pick another spot. One brainless creature not only burrowed into the yard, but then set up a hidey-hole under the stump of a tree in the front rock pile, right where the dogs love to play and sniff for wayward chippies, squirrels, uninformed rabbits and other varmints.  Oh, and one day, this creature decided to come out and explore while the dogs were in the yard! Yikes!  I never knew that a) groundhogs were so BIG when they stand on their hind legs and snarl and b) that they had such LONG teeth. The dogs baited the groundhog until they chased it back to the burrow entrance. It hasn't made another appearance, luckily, and the hole to the yard itself has been capped and remains abandoned.

So, anyone have any safe (Iand legal) ideas about ridding the area of these nasty rabies and tick-carrying rodents? That means I cannot use a BB gun, a .22 rifle (even though I do know how to use one and have my Sharpshooter badge from camp to prove it!), M-80s or other explosives. And I cannot use anything that would be toxic to the dogs, since they could eat something without us being aware or able to stop them. The only alternatives for fencing are 6 foot fencing with the laddering on the OUTSIDE, electric fencing to top the 4 foot fencing, or that ugly overhang stuff to keep the dogs from jumping out-but they could go to another side and hop over the fence so I don't see that helping...I'm open for ideas-let