At posting, the verdict was not yet in, but there are plenty of groundhog stories, like:

Far from celebrating groundhogs, New Hampshire once tried to eradicate them from the state via a short-lived but wildly successful bounty on their pelts.

The state paid $12,206 in groundhog bounty claims for the fiscal year ending June 1885. At 10 cents per pelt, that amounted to more than 120,000 groundhogs — or woodchucks, as they were called then.

The bounty, which was repealed soon after, was the result of a legislative committee appointed to study the critters. Their view was decidedly negative.

Declaring the animals “not only a nuisance, but also a bore,” state Rep. Charles Corning called them “absolutely destitute of any interesting qualities” and “one of the worst enemies ever known to the farmer” in his 1883 “Report of the Woodchuck Committee.