Everybody but me is
celebrating Lewis and Clark’s achievements, but I’m too
peeved at William.
Among other feats, those two travelers
from Virginia named about 1,528 places, plants and animals. Captain
Lewis, who studied science especially for the trip, correctly named
one of the creatures they encountered a “barking squirrel.” William
Clark changed the name to “prairie dog.”
The misnomer, I
think, causes folks who don’t know the animal’s habits
to think it’s as cute and cuddly as the family poodle. So I
blame Clark for the latest ugly battle between folks who live in
the West, and those who love it from afar.
The prairie
dog has become an environmental pinup, the new baby seal, but it
belongs to the order Rodentia, which includes
squirrels, rats, gophers, mice, beaver and porcupines. My ranching
neighbors call them “prairie rats,” a more accurate description
than Clark’s.
Finally, the very first serious
scientific study of prairie dogs has confirmed what ranchers have
been saying for years: They eat or destroy more grass than cows or
bison. Those pastures aren’t overgrazed, they’re
over-gnawed.
Scientists from South Dakota State
University’s West River Agriculture Center worked with Sinte
Gleska University collecting vegetation from three sites in 2002-3.
They demonstrated that prairie dogs remove three-fourths of the
forage from prairie dog towns in cattle pastures; livestock get
only one-fourth.
“Prairie dogs compete with cattle for
pasture and can significantly reduce the amount of available
forage,” says Pat Johnson, professor of animal and range sciences.
Grass on a prairie dog town is less accessible and less desirable
to cattle — and wildlife — than forage on similar sites
without prairie dog towns. The rodents also clip vegetation short
so they can spot predators. In wet years, they cut more than they
eat.
Moreover, says Johnson, heavy grazing discourages
prairie dogs. Folks who howl about overgrazing in the West cast
cattle as the culprits. But those ranchers may actually be using
the most environmentally correct method of getting rid of the
rodents without harming other species.
Prairie dogs
don’t stay inside the fences of national parks where they are
protected, so South Dakota ranchers are suing the state, asking it
to follow its own laws and control prairie dogs that leave public
lands for private. Natural predators — coyotes, hawks,
eagles, rattlesnakes — are too few to control populations.
Some ranchers, desperate after years of drought, are spending more
than $200 a day in labor, fuel, and time to poison prairie dogs
before they — literally — eat us out of our home
ranges. It’s time to replace emotional wrangling with facts.
Lack of information affects many disagreements about
Western land. In 1989, I wrote an article for
Life magazine, and referred to “prairie dog
towns,” those colonies of thousands of prairie dogs covering
hundreds of acres. The editor called me to say that, in 30 years of
editing, he’d never heard of prairie dog towns. “Are you
trying to tell me that prairie dogs live in little metropolises?”
Yup, I said. “If I used that term,” he said, “I’d
be the laughingstock of New York.” Well, said I, if you don’t
use it, I’ll be the laughingstock of South Dakota. Still, he
edited my essay to fit his preconceived notions. Most writers could
relate similar anecdotes over the years.
The experts on a
particular place are the folks who live there. Sure, some of them
are pigheaded, chew tobacco and haven’t been to college. But
they probably know more about their home ground than someone who
lives elsewhere.
After finding prairie dogs on more than
400,000 acres in South Dakota, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
in 2000 said the blacktailed prairie dog warranted listing as a
threatened species. Figuring 30 to the acre, that means South
Dakota has 12 million, and, in this age of the Big Scary Virus,
let’s not forget that these rodents harbor fleas which may
carry bubonic plague.
William Clark was a tourist who
made good maps, but he didn’t live with prairie dogs, so he
didn’t have enough information to choose a good name.
That’s the problem: Folks who don’t live on the Plains
need a chance to learn from observation. In the spirit of
generosity for which Westerners are justly famous, we Dakota
ranchers would be proud to help our city neighbors make informed
decisions about how best to manage the critters. I hear coyotes
have moved to Los Angeles and New York City, so ecological
education is well begun.
Now let’s establish
prairie dog colonies — a couple of million rats apiece
— in the green parks in every city in the country, starting
with Central Park. Then we can negotiate.
Linda
M. Hasselstrom ranches at Hermosa, South Dakota, and lives in
Cheyenne, Wyoming. She is the author of 11 books, mostly about her
life as a South Dakota rancher.
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