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When I was in junior high school, I got my first memorable exposure to the mixed blessings of progress.
On many occasions before that sad day, I pedaled my clunky old bicycle to a prairie-dog town on the outskirts of Greeley, on the Great Plains of northern Colorado.
I could coast in quietly and watch the rodents go about their business until a sentinel noticed me and yelped. Then they'd all run down their burrows and hide for a few minutes, before returning, one by one, to the surface -- as long as I stayed still.
Any teacher can tell you that it takes quite a spectacle to get a 13-year-old boy to stay quiet. So I was heartbroken one spring day when I found transits and stakes, along with an active bulldozer, instead of prairie dogs.
The sign said a new junior high school was under construction. How could they destroy an educational prairie-dog town just to build a torture chamber designed to imprison, stifle and bore teen-aged boys like me?
My parents offered consolation. Even if that colony was gone forever, there were zillions of other prairie dogs spread across the vast Great Plains.
They were right, but that was 35 years ago. Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering the black-tailed prairie dog for listing under the Endangered Species Act. There may have once been 1.5 billion of them spread across 250 million acres, but thanks to new schools -- and highways, subdivisions, shopping malls and intensive agriculture -- habitat is now down to 700,000 acres.
Prairie dogs aren't really dogs. They're football-sized vegetarian rodents with short legs and tails. They got the name because their calls sound like barks. They dig tunnels on the prairie, and live in towns with thousands of residents.
There are five species in North America. Two are thriving -- the white-tailed and the Gunnison -- but the Utah is threatened, and the Mexican endangered.
Prairie dogs convert grass, indigestible by many animals, into edible protein, which makes them the base of the food chain for hawks, ferrets and bobcats. Their burrows provide housing for snakes and burrowing owls.
Many ranchers see them as the enemy. The varmints eat forage that is supposed to go to cattle, and their holes break the legs of man and beast. Ranchers respond with guns, traps and poison.
Even though some ranchers are prominent supporters of
the property rights movement,
they're not
consistent, as recent action in the Colorado legislature
demonstrates.
As development oozes along the Front Range of Colorado, prairie-dog towns get hit hard. Some environmental groups try to relocate the rodents. One is the Boulder-based Southern Plains Land Trust, which bought 1,200 acres in Baca County (the part of Colorado closest to Oklahoma) for a preserve for relocated prairie dogs.
Did the cattlemen say We want other people to respect
our property rights, and in turn, we respect their right to
do what they want with their land, even if we don't exactly
approve.
Of course not. They lobbied the state legislature for a
law which forbids importing destructive rodent pests
without consent of the affected county commissioners.
To their credit, some conservative Republicans opposed this as a an assault on private property rights, but at last report, the law was on its way to the governor's desk.
This seems sad -- you can import all the cows you want to your property, and cows aren't native to North America, but you can't bring in prairie dogs, which were here long before the cow and horse arrived.
Is there a solution?
Consider the success of organizations like Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited. They kill animals, but they want the fish and fowl to flourish, and so the members work effectively for habitat preservation and enhancement.
A friend who hunts prairie dogs (the thriving Gunnison) tells me that the national Varmint Hunters Association has 40,000 members, and that some outfitters get $350 a day to conduct prairie-dog hunts.
Note also that the Southern Plains Land Trust was able to raise $198,000 to buy the Baca County land for proposed prairie-dog habitat. This means that the resources are present, if organized properly, for a powerful new conservation group: Prairie-Dogs Unlimited.
The varmint hunters, various environmental organizations and many of us plain citizens do share a goal -- more habitat and thus more prairie dogs for a healthy Great Plains, just as Ducks Unlimited wants more marshes for more ducks to hunt.
PETA wouldn't like it -- a bunch of guys squinting through their rifle scopes to blast furry little animals. But name one piece of habitat that PETA has ever protected, and then look at the solid accomplishments of the trout-takers and duck-killers. There's every reason to believe the varmint hunters would be just as effective.
But can the environmental movement even consider making such an alliance for the good of the Great Plains ecosystem? Or is it as hypocritical as the property-rights movement?
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