Doggone!

The “City of Russell Springs,” Kansas, a seven-hour drive west of Kansas City, is not a major tourist destination. No store. No phone. No cell service. Population: 29. You bring your own food, and you bunk at the city’s single hotel—the Logan House, built in 1887; no management on site; $50 a night; leave your check on the desk.

Stroll outside the city limits, and you can see for 10 miles on all compass points. This wet August the landscape is mostly green and, save for the odd, distant grain elevator, seemingly undefiled by humans. The only sounds impart a sense of peace—the rustle of cottonwoods, the buzz of cicadas, the occasional banter of crows. But a war is raging between locals on one side and wildlife, environmentalists, and the feds on the other.

This is privately owned farm and ranch country, where the Farm Bureau and the three-man, elected Logan County Commission rule—the Farm Bureau purely with rhetoric, the commission by promulgating and attempting to enforce regulations of dubious legal standing eminently challengeable in court. These entities encourage the notion, popular in these parts, that government should not impose on a rancher’s life except to issue him checks for farm assistance and that property rights are sacrosanct except when the rancher wants to impose on the lives of his neighbors. Here, as in most of their range, black-tailed prairie dogs are reviled because they’re thought (often wrongly) to compete with cattle for grass. While they eat very little grass, they clip a lot so they can see predators. But sometimes where cattle are frequently rotated to new pasture, prairie dogs benefit them because the plants that grow around the dog towns are especially nutritious. That’s why cattle often gravitate to dog towns in spring and summer.

Prairie dogs are ground squirrels that sound and act like dogs. They bark, sit erect, wag their tails, wrestle like puppies, and exchange “kisses” with jaws agape. Throughout the West about 95 percent of the black-tailed prairie dogs—the most widely distributed of the five species—have been eliminated by land use change, poison, shooting, and bubonic or “sylvatic”—meaning found in the wild—plague, probably introduced by stowaway rats from Asia circa 1899 and now spreading through the West. Accordingly, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proclaimed in 1998 that the black-tailed prairie dog warranted listing as threatened. But two years later it ruled that listing was “warranted but precluded”—bureaucratese for, “Yeah, we should do it, but we’re too busy.” Rousted by court order, the service is currently conducting a “status review” to see if listing is necessary. While actual extinction seems unlikely, that’s the common goal in the West. “I think you have to try to kill them all,” said rancher and Logan County Commission chairman Carl Uhrich when I interviewed him at his house just south of Oakley. “It’s just like if you got termites in your house. Do you just kill part of them? Or do you clean them all out?”

But when you clean out prairie dogs you clean out lots of other wildlife. As prey they feed all manner of mammalian and avian carnivores and scavengers, and as burrowers they aerate soil and provide shelter for reptiles, amphibians, burrowing owls, rabbits, and rodents. At least 150 vertebrate species benefit from prairie dogs—about 30 of which depend on them to varying extents, including the endangered black-footed ferret, which can’t exist without them and whose wild population (in spring, before kits are born) is about 500. Black-footed ferrets had been presumed extinct until September 1981, when they were rediscovered in Meeteetse, Wyoming, by an investigator named Shep, who toted a dead one back to a ranch house. Shep was a dog. Because the population wasn’t doing well, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service evacuated all animals in order to breed them in captivity, and I went out to file a report for Audubon. I hadn’t expected them to be so beautiful or so small. They popped out of their artificial prairie dog burrows and fixed me with bright, alert eyes. Much of the environmental community, myself included, passionately opposed removing black-footed ferrets from the wild. And if the biologists had followed our advice (see my “The Final Ferret Fiasco,” May 1986), black-footed ferrets would be extinct.

The irrational hatred of prairie dogs is particularly evident in the “varminters,” who speak reverently of “IVG” (instant visual gratification), experienced when their high-powered bullets make prairie dogs explode in “red mist.” “Red-Mist Society” T-shirts were popular in 1992 when, on another Audubon assignment, I observed a prairie dog shoot in South Dakota, where a bill was later introduced to rename the prairie dog the “prairie rat.” Rich Grable—better known as “Mr. Dog”—rested his .222 rifle on a foam pad taped to the base of his truck window and partly melted by barrel heat. Crack. He cut a target in half, sending hindquarters spinning. “Dead,” he declared, punching his dashboard-mounted kill counter. Babies, standing beside burrows with paws on their siblings’ shoulders, exploded in red mist. Once Grable killed five with a single shot. “Can ya hear it go plop?” he cackled. “Dissolved him! Ha. Ha.” Whenever a target dragged itself back into its burrow, minus major body parts, Mr. Dog would shout: “I done somethin’ to him.” According to his shooting journal, he’d killed 7,652 the previous year.

That mindset hadn’t changed on August 18, 2009, when I visited Gene Bertrand at his cattle ranch in Wallace, Kansas. Bertrand spoke proudly of the wild turkeys I’d seen behind his house, and he told me about all the species that depend on prairie dogs and how some of them are disappearing. But even prairie dog advocates aren’t opposed to hosting varminters at $150 per person, per day. “We had a nice hunting business up until a year ago,” he said. “We averaged $25,000 a year; that’s about what I get per acre with cattle. We used to see 30 or 40 ferruginous hawks a day; they learned to come to the sound of the guns.”

That wasn’t great for the hawks because the prairie dogs varminters leave to rot on the ground are frequently impregnated with lead splinters, poisoning anything that eats them. For four years Ron Klataske, director of Audubon of Kansas, has been offering varminters nontoxic copper ammo at the cost of slightly cheaper lead bullets. He’s had no takers.

Shooters can only thin dog towns, not eliminate them. But a weapon of mass destruction has recently been deployed on prairie dogs. It’s Rozol, an anticoagulant that causes uncontrolled bleeding in anything that ingests it. Rozol was registered for black-tailed prairie dogs by George W. Bush’s EPA in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming and, in May 2009, by Barack Obama’s EPA in the remaining five states where black-tailed prairie dogs exist—Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and North Dakota. (A similar anticoagulant, Kaput, has also been registered in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Texas, and Kansas, but it’s not in wide use, perhaps because it’s newer.) Three Ph.D. scientists from the EPA’s Environmental Fate and Effects Division were ignored when they warned their superiors that Rozol has “considerable potential for both primary and secondary risks to birds and nontarget mammals and possibly reptiles.” (As Audubon went to press, Defenders of Wildlife and Audubon of Kansas sued the EPA over its decision about the use of Rozol on prairie dogs.)

Zinc phosphide, the previous poison of choice, kills few nontarget species. It’s effective, fast-acting, cheap, and readily available. But prairie dogs find it bitter, so to condition them to eating, you have to “pre-bait” with untreated grain. The advantage of Rozol is that prairie dogs don’t mind the taste, so you can skip pre-baiting. According to the label, you must place Rozol-treated bait only in burrows, which isn’t always done. And you must return and bury the carcasses, something few if any ranchers would do and which is impossible anyway because Rozol can take up to 20 days to kill, during which time prairie dogs leave their burrows, slowly bleed from every orifice, and stumble around, magnets for all predators and scavengers.