Little Dogs on the Prairie: A Triple Threat

January 20, 2011

Join us this week as we explore prairie dog ecology and conservation with Patrick McMillan, Clemson University naturalist. Patrick is the host of an educational TV program on wildlife and botany called “Expeditions.”

Black-tailed prairie dogs once occupied millions of acres of grasslands from the southern Canadian plains down to northern Mexico and across parts of 11 states in between. Today, they occupy less than five percent of their historic range due to the triple threat of people, poison and plague.

For more than a century, prairie dog colonies have been plowed under by farmers and developers. Prairie dogs have also been shot at by ranchers and others who viewed the small ground squirrels as annoying varmints. To this day, prairie dogs can still be “controlled” on private land by almost any means necessary, and the critters are routinely shot simply for sport.

That legacy has greatly influenced state and federal agencies who, for the past century, have been using dangerous poisons that kill not only prairie dogs but also numerous other species like swift foxes, eagles, turkeys and pheasants that join them on the prairie. While some poisons have been banned, new ones constantly emerge. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently approved the use of Rozol, an anti-coagulant chemical that causes animals to slowly bleed to death when ingested, and is considering allowing the use of a similar poison called Kaput-D.

To make matters worse, prairie dogs are now faced with an age-old killer: plague. The disease is essentially the same as the bubonic plague that wiped out human populations across Europe during the Middle Ages. Plague is not native to North American, arriving on ships in the early 1900s. Prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets and dozens of other animals are highly susceptible to sylvatic plague which is carried by fleas, and several colonies have fallen victim in recent years.

Together, these three factors (people, poison and plague) are a formidable force against the recovery of prairie dogs. Check back tomorrow to see what Defenders is doing to fight back and conserve this critical prairie species.

In case you’re just tuning in to the series, track back to see our posts about prairie dog behavior, their role as a keystone species, and an unusual encounter between a prairie dog and a ferret.