Feds Decline To “Relist” Prairie Dogs

A story in the Billings Gazette today reports that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has declined to act on the latest petition from an environmental group to put Prairie Dogs on the Endangered Species List.

You may be aware that MSSA has fought against Prairie Dog listing for years. We’ve seen such efforts as further attempts to hijack wildlife and land by the enviro-wackos. PDs could be the most numerous and widely-distributed animal in the U.S.; certainly one of the most. There are uncounted millions of PDs in 11 states, occupying (and decimating) vast tracts of land.

The original petition by the National Wildlife Federation made the ridiculous claim that PDs occupy less than 1% of their historic range, with zero facts to support that assertion. Well, they did offer one short observation about one location in Montana from the journals of Lewis and Clark that there sure seemed to be a lot of PDs, but that’s all.

PDs are rodents – rats. They are called “prairie rats” by many. They breed prolifically, and they carry the Bubonic Plague, a disease that wiped out half the human population of Europe twice in history. To sidestep the bad PR associated with Plague infestation in PDs, sympathetic biologists use a different name for this disease when it occurs in PDs – sylvatic plague, but it’s the same disease. PDs live in high-density towns where they turn their “habitat” into a moonscape of gravel and dirt. Hardly anything grows there. No wonder ranchers don’t like them.

The enviro-wackos claim that PDs are a “keystone” species – that they are a critical species that all other life depends on. Bull! It’s true that PDs are the chief prey for the enviro-wackos special darling, Black-footed Ferrets. There is an ongoing attempt to “reintroduce” B-FFs that is generally a dismal failure. The usual exercise is, biologists raise B-FFs in captivity at dramatic public expense, biologists release B-FFs, local coyotes eat the B-FFs, a tasty but expensive snack. End of exercise (except for billing taxpayers). This effort has supported a generation of otherwise-unemployable biologists, cranked out by the same academic institutions that churn out all the lawyers suing us over PDs.

One ongoing claim by the PD-lovers is that shooting of PDs by recreational shooters is a serious threat to PD populations. I can tell you that unless all the military of the World move their rifle training to U.S. PD habitat, shooting doesn’t even dent PD populations. Actually, shooting these rats stimulates their reproductive rate, just as would additional predation by coyotes and birds of prey (don’t tell this to the rancher you ask for permission to shoot PDs on private property). Shooting PDs does amount to a useful welfare program for the lazy coyotes and scavenger birds that clean up after PD hunters.

So, it turns out that shooting PDs is not the end-of-life-on-Earth problem the enviro-wackos have claimed, born out by actual studies of PD populations by actual scientists. And, since the National Wildlife Federation originally claimed that PDs were on the verge of extinction more PD counting has been done, documenting that there untold millions of PDs in the U.S. Then number of millions grows with each count.

MSSA did submit lengthy comment to the USFWS in opposition to this most recent attempt to put PDs on the Endangered Species List. We don’t know if they actually listened to us or just used common sense. At lease MSSA is on the winning side, again. We hope this recent decision puts the matter to rest for good.

Gary Marbut, president
Montana Shooting Sports Association
http://www.mtssa.org
author, Gun Laws of Montana
http://www.mtpublish.com