July 3, 2002

Plains Folk: Prairie Dogs

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

During a recent expedition to Eastend, Saskatchewan, exploring the boyhood environment of the author Wallace Stegner, we paid a visit to ranch friends nearby. A yellow sign at the entrance to the yard announced cooperation with a program for protection of burrowing owls. This was worth a picture, as the burrowing owl plays a quizzical role in the first chapter of Stegner's classic memoir, "Wolf Willow."

From there we drove to the family farm in Barton County, Kan. and found a colony of prairie dogs thriving in one of the pastures--one of several colonies on private land in the locality. Looping home to North Dakota, I found the new issue of North Dakota Outdoors, containing well-reasoned articles on the status of black-tailed prairie dogs and burrowing owls.

I wish there were more such reasonable statements before the public. Pity the poor prairie dogs, along with the owls, ferrets, foxes, and other animals that depend on them. The critters have a fair chance of survival and recovery in a region where people are rethinking their relationship with nature. The human society of the plains is prepared as at no time since Euro-American, Euro-Canadian settlement to make a place for wild things. This is a tender sensibility, however, the development of which is threatened by parties who see prairie dogs not as valued neighbors but as political tools.

Let us begin not with a hymn, but with confession of sins. Our heritage on the plains is one of rapacious destruction of wildlife. Within the context of economic land use, whereby we transformed prairie into fields and pastures, thereby squeezing out many species, we also just killed indiscriminately.

From Theodore Roosevelt a century ago to the National Wildlife Federation today, we have required persons and agencies outside the region to call us to account for our lack of husbandry. On the other hand, attitudes toward nature among plains folk surely have changed.

The predominately urban population of the region today wants to see wildlife in the open spaces around them. Farmers and ranchers, for their part--at least a good number of them--are more tolerant of prairie dogs and other wildlife they once persecuted. Their very technological potency gives them confidence they can coexist with animals once feared.

We no longer fear prairie dogs, but we live in terror of radical environmentalists and animal rights organizations with designs on the plains. Because ranchers, like pastoral peoples worldwide, have a tendency to be pugnacious, the intemperate rhetoric of the alleged friends of prairie dogs is matched by the ranchers with whom they pick their fights. Attempts to establish federal protective status for prairie dogs, too, have led some landowners to eradicate the animals from their properties, out of fear they will lose control of the future.

States and provinces of the plains are working through plans for prairie dog recovery. We live in a land of free speech, freedom of association and digital free enterprise, wherein the loudest voices are not likely to be the wisest. It is possible, though, to discern the parties who lack good faith, to identify them publicly, and to proceed sagely in disregard of them.

Here are working principles for sorting such things out. First, watch out for parties who propose categorical answers, people who have grand visions sweeping all before them. Grand, homogenous designs are unstable and perilous. Anyone who says the plains should be given over entirely to a species, a formation, an enterprise or a point of view is a dangerous radical.

Second, isolate and disregard the culture warriors. There are urban radicals who desire to eradicate farmers and ranchers on the plains. They have objectified farmers and ranchers and will use such things as prairie dogs to strike at them. Farmers and ranchers also have objectified their perceived enemies, causing them to stop their ears to good ideas as well as bad. There is a lot of space on the plains.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Tom Jirik, (701) 231-9629, tjirik@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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