/ˈprerē dôɡ/
Prairie Dogs
“I heard some people hate the prairie dogs”
“Oh yes, irrationally so”
“They seem so cute”
“Ya but the ranchers poison and shoot them. They eat the grass and dig holes in their property. Seems like it goes back to the homesteader days.”
“Oh”
“Trouble is they’re a keystone species”
“What does that mean?”
“Without them, the prairies die”
Our sense of the land changes depending on the framework we view it from. A seemingly objective thing that exists out there, is radically changed depending on our priorities, or the priorities of the structure(s) we’re within. “Knowledges are world-making practices, they tend to make the worlds they know.”2
In the Badlands, this can be seen most blatantly with the different perspectives people have on Prairie Dogs.
Badlands National Park is located in Southern South Dakota. It is a complex and layered place where many different land-uses border one another: National Park, Wilderness, Forest Service, Tribal Land, Military Lands, Ranchers, Road Side Attractions, Private Businesses. These borders present wildly different ideas about prairie dogs, ones that create very real consequences in terms of action taken, and futures created.
The National Park sees prairie dogs as a keystone species which “influence ecosystem structure, composition, and function in a unique and significant manner through their activities, and the effect is disproportionate to their numerical abundance”3. They are prey to many animals including the brought-back-from-near-extinction black footed ferret, their burrows are made into nests by the burrowing owl, and they use their teeth to clip away grasses which keep the prairies healthy. Because of all this, and the concern that “if removed, the ecosystem itself may collapse”4, a lot of work goes into tracking their population size, curing them of bubonic plague, and making sure their towns are healthy.
The ranchers see them as vermin and kill them through poison and shooting. They do this on their private land and also on forest service land where conservation practices allow for hunting. The primary complaint is that prairie dogs are competitors for the resources that their cattle need, a complaint that goes back to the first settlers in the late 1800s when prairie dogs first became seen as vermin to be exterminated: “At the start of this century there were an estimated 40,000,000 ha of prairie dog habitat; by 1960, that had been reduced to 600,000 ha, a decline of 98.5% in 60 years.”5
The farmers are often independent family owned businesses with little profit margin. Their focus revolves around cattle, as does the ecosystem they build on their land. In an ecosystem increasingly defined by one species, the prairie dogs have no place.
- any of a genus (Cynomys) of gregarious burrowing rodents of the squirrel family chiefly of central and western U.S. plains
- especially : a black-tailed rodent (C. ludovicianus) that usually lives in extensive colonial burrows
Prairie Dogs
“I heard some people hate the prairie dogs”
“Oh yes, irrationally so”
“They seem so cute”
“Ya but the ranchers poison and shoot them. They eat the grass and dig holes in their property. Seems like it goes back to the homesteader days.”
“Oh”
“Trouble is they’re a keystone species”
“What does that mean?”
“Without them, the prairies die”
Our sense of the land changes depending on the framework we view it from. A seemingly objective thing that exists out there, is radically changed depending on our priorities, or the priorities of the structure(s) we’re within. “Knowledges are world-making practices, they tend to make the worlds they know.”2
In the Badlands, this can be seen most blatantly with the different perspectives people have on Prairie Dogs.
Badlands National Park is located in Southern South Dakota. It is a complex and layered place where many different land-uses border one another: National Park, Wilderness, Forest Service, Tribal Land, Military Lands, Ranchers, Road Side Attractions, Private Businesses. These borders present wildly different ideas about prairie dogs, ones that create very real consequences in terms of action taken, and futures created.
The National Park sees prairie dogs as a keystone species which “influence ecosystem structure, composition, and function in a unique and significant manner through their activities, and the effect is disproportionate to their numerical abundance”3. They are prey to many animals including the brought-back-from-near-extinction black footed ferret, their burrows are made into nests by the burrowing owl, and they use their teeth to clip away grasses which keep the prairies healthy. Because of all this, and the concern that “if removed, the ecosystem itself may collapse”4, a lot of work goes into tracking their population size, curing them of bubonic plague, and making sure their towns are healthy.
The ranchers see them as vermin and kill them through poison and shooting. They do this on their private land and also on forest service land where conservation practices allow for hunting. The primary complaint is that prairie dogs are competitors for the resources that their cattle need, a complaint that goes back to the first settlers in the late 1800s when prairie dogs first became seen as vermin to be exterminated: “At the start of this century there were an estimated 40,000,000 ha of prairie dog habitat; by 1960, that had been reduced to 600,000 ha, a decline of 98.5% in 60 years.”5
The farmers are often independent family owned businesses with little profit margin. Their focus revolves around cattle, as does the ecosystem they build on their land. In an ecosystem increasingly defined by one species, the prairie dogs have no place.
1. "prairie dog." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, 2021. Web. 7 December 2021. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prairie%20dog ︎︎︎
2. Cadena, Marisol de la, and Mario Blaser, eds. “Introduction: Pluriverse Proposals for a World of Many Worlds.” In A World of Many Worlds, 1–22. Duke University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478004318-001. ︎︎︎
3. Miller, B., R. Reading, J. Hoogland, T. Clark, G. Ceballos, R. List, S. Forrest, et al. “The Role of Prairie Dogs as a Keystone Species: Response to Stapp.” Conservation Biology 14, no. 1 (February 2000): 318–21. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1523-1739.2000.99201.x. ︎︎︎
4. National Park Serive, Prairie Dogs: Pipsqueaks of the Prairie, November 10, 2020, https://www.nps.gov/articles/prairie-dogs.htm ︎︎︎
5. Miller, et al., Prairie Dogs as a Keystone Species