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Page: Profile: Wren's Nest News Local
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Article: 12281
[Environmental]
Date Posted:
2/15/2005
11:41:19 pm EST
Wvox Stats
Views: 7,870
RSS: 2,991
Comments: 6
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Ranchers Blame Government For Prairie Dog Damage
Author: Chet Brokaw, Associated Press Source: Tampa Bay Online
Title: RANCHERS BLAME GOVERNMENT FOR PRAIRIE DOG DAMAGE
Jerry Heinrichs says that because of the long-running drought across the West, his cattle had to compete with prairie dogs for the grass. And the prairie dogs won.
Across his ranch and other swaths of both private and government-owned grassland in southwestern South Dakota, about 50 miles east of Mount Rushmore, little remains but bare dirt, stones, prairie dog mounds and the burrowing rodents that live under them.
Heinrichs mostly blames the federal government, which for more than four years stopped poisoning prairie dogs while it decided whether the critters regarded by ranchers as a nuisance deserved to be protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The dispute has illustrated the wide canyon between ranchers and environmentalists and the difficulty the government has in trying to satisfy both sides while carrying out the Endangered Species Act.
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Community Thoughts: There are 6 comments posted | Reverse Sort |
| The Farmers | Feb 16th. at 9:01:52 pm EST
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medusa (seattle, Washington) - Email Me
want us to kill wolves, prairie dogs, coyotes, and heavens knows what else. They want to graze their cattle on public land, use public water. So much for the self sufficient westerner.
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| Competition | Feb 16th. at 12:14:13 pm EST
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Ahr-Ohn (Bridgeport, Connecticut) - Email Me
"All we're trying to do is find a few places on public land, and on private lands where landowners are interested, to maintain healthy prairie dog populations, " he said.
If Prarie Dog is better at using these resources than Cattle, how do we harvest and Market?
I can't think of a better way to protect their numbers.
Aaron
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| Some How | Feb 16th. at 12:00:49 pm EST
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Candleberry (Port Angeles, Alaska) - Email Me
I don't think the Prairie Dogs are the main problem. To quote the article:
The landowners were free to poison prairie dogs on their own property, but they say there was no point in doing that, because the animals would have quickly returned from government land.
Helping themselves does not seem to be an option. Only the government can do it. (You note later in the text the government is subsidising poisoning the Prairie Dogs on private land)
Some how, I just want to root for the Prairie Dogs.
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| Try Living With One In Your Backyard | Feb 16th. at 11:10:44 am EST
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Raven (Lyman, Wyoming) - Email Me
I agree that the government should get out of the farming and ranching businesses, up to and including NAFTA. But, the main problem is that the prairie dog, while cute and cuddly looking, they are a rodent, they carry a multitude of diseases that can be passed on to man, plague and rabies the main two.
They are a prey species, but most of the preditors that lived off them (i.e.: the black footed ferret) died off of a disease the carry, (distemper ) or were killed to protect livestock
(bobcats, rattlesnakes, coyotes and fox)
Since man caused the imbalance, it is his to try to maintain balance by thinning numbers, either by hunting the critters or poison.
I have personally seen what one colony can do to a patch of land in a very short time with no control. One pair was introduced by a couple that liked to watch the babies play. It was their property, no law against it, so they did it. Put them in a beautiful mountain meadow on a hillside. Plenty of food and water. And the babies were really cute out on a sunny day. They also breed as fast as rats.
Within 6 years, there wasn't much grass left on 10 acres of meadow. Mounds and holes made up a new moonscape of bare earth. Where there had been a pair, with their offspring and the offspring of others that move in from the other side of the hill, there were thousands. Then, one of their grandkids contracted the plague from a fleabite off one of their dogs that had been chasing the rodents. Dog died, kid made it.
Maybe man should just let nature be. Wild horses, praire dogs, bison, etc., should be allowed to starve when the range they live on is overpopulated rather than feed and water them, like the government does with the elk in Jackson hole, the bison in Yellowstone, or the wild horses in corrals, waiting for someone to adopt them.
Put a couple of prairie dogs in your prime farmland and see how it goes. They make gophers look tame.
I am an educated aggie. (Ag major in college.)
It would be great if subsidies weren't needed, but farmers and ranchers are in the only industry that is not allowed to set their own price for their product in order to get back what is put in. And they recieve less than cost more often than they break even.
Add to that competition from Canadian and other imports, and prairie dogs, and drought, and coalbed methane, even the subsidies aren't enought to keep them in business. Most are selling out to land developers for subdivisions.
So rich, city people can watch the prairedogs play................................
Please excuse the rant, but where I am from, this a sore subject all the way around.
Raven
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