You think of the groundhog as the thing wrecking your garden, but much of your local wildlife depends on them.
A groundhog digs burrows that run up to 40 feet of tunnel with multiple rooms, and when it moves out, half the local wildlife moves in.
Foxes raise their pups in old groundhog dens. Rabbits, skunks, opossums, weasels, chipmunks, and snakes all shelter in them. One Wisconsin study found 20 different species using woodchuck burrows.
And all that digging churns and aerates a huge amount of soil, pulling subsoil up, mixing in nutrients, and opening the ground so rain soaks in instead of running off. It does for nothing what gardeners pay a tiller to do.
It might eat your lettuce, but it also built the den your fox family lives in. Let the groundhogs do their thing.