Prairie dogs immediately escape from $500k escape-proof habitat
The Maryland Zoo spent $500,000 to make an escape-proof prairie dog habitat, called Prairie Dog Town.
The prairie dogs escaped within 10 minutes of being introduced to their new habitat. Zookeepers caught the escaped prairie dogs with nets.
(Public domain photo of Black-tailed Prairie Dog taken by Adrian Pingstone)Aircraft wire, poured concrete and slick plastic walls proved no match for the fast-footed rodents, the stars of a new exhibit that opens today.
As officials were promoting the return of the zoo's 28 prairie dogs - their former digs had been out of sight in a closed section of the animal preserve for more than four years - some of the critters found ways to jump, climb and get over the walls of their prairie paradise, a centerpiece exhibit just inside the zoo's main entrance.
Prairie dogs immediately escape from $500k escape-proof habitat
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Heard they were thinking of relocating the exhibit to Alcatraz....oops, nope, they'd just commandeer a sailboat and end up at the Buena Vista in SF having Irish Coffees...
build something like Hex, only prairie dogs instead of ants?
It still worked better than the two-million-dollar moat they installed around the bird enclosure.
never get tired of it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAWokZuszuU
Next season one of the prairie dogs brothers comes in with a tattoo of the zoo hidden in his fur as they manage to concoct a plan to sneak out disguised as beavers.
They get caught but the original charges against them come into question by a surprise confessional from a fellow gopher being held in an adjacent lot of the impenetrable 500k supermax rodent prison.
Who let the dogs out? Woot!
Having lived next to a piece of land where the owner did not control the prairie dog population, I've learned the only way to keep those puppies in line is to poison them. Call me a horrible person, but it's true.
Or suck them up from their homes with large vacuum cleaners and sell them to foreigners for thousands of dollars (true story).
Wow they're so cute!
This makes me giggle and puts a smile on my face. thank you.
Some of my fondest memories of growing up in Montana and being with my dad include participating in Prarie Dog Derbies.
Teams of two shooters (the serious ones would have a third drive the truck so both shooters can stand in the back) would descend on bars in tiny towns where after a brief organizational meeting we would disperse to our designated hunting grounds - nearby farms and ranches - and proceed to shoot as many prairie dogs as possible and then cut their tails off.
After the two day event, the winning team (collected the most tails) would win a grand prize, sometimes a belt buckle in proud cowboy tradition. Other prizes went to biggest prairie dog, other animals like rock chucks or porcupines.
This was often a big community event in which the local farmers opened up their land as a way to help keep down the population of these guys who can wreck havoc on a farm, and since poisoning is illegal ;) Nutmeag #8.
I had my own .22 tricked out for this type of competition with banana clips, bull barrell, good scope, bipod. I even had a gopher call, that when blowed into produced a chirping whistle that would induce the gopher to poke their heads up out of their holes.
Makes me wonder what those PETA people who are making a stink about flying fishes at the fish market would have to say about my gopher derbies.
Jay Acker, I've met one or two other people who took party in large scale prairie dog hunting. My question is, what kind of damage are the prairie dogs capable of? This is an honest question. I grew up in the California suburbs and I've never seen a real prairie dog and have no idea what kinds of problems they create. Some people might find the prairie dog derby as some sort of massacre, but I think if you substituted ugly, plague-carrying rats, there would be little objection. Problem is, prairie dogs look kind of cute in the pictures I've seen. As any good American knows, it's only ok to kill animals when they are dangerous or delicious. So, if the prairie dog isn't dangerous....
And this is why we can't have anything nice, like a zoo filled with dinosaurs. Wait a minute, we could open a Creationism museum and clone some dinosaurs to live there, because everyone knows that dinosaurs and humans co-existed as vegetarians! Creationists could go there to see what it was like to live in the Garden of Eden with a tyrannosaurus rex!
They're also terrible kleptomaniacs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f647nAsBI0I
Awesome! Let's read Little Brother to them and see what happens next. Go Lil hackers Go
Anonymous:
The complaint against prairie dogs is that they have a habit of clearing any and all vegetation around their habitats. They use this to line the tunnels that they build, and it's presumed that it also acts as defense against ground-based predators, by denying them cover.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the little guys, but they can breed like mad, and with their effective anti-predator measures, populations could get out of control pretty quickly.
I should think the best way to control a population of prairie dogs would be to introduce a population of ferrets.
Once upon a time the Santa Barbara Zoo had capybaras. One day, one escaped. He managed to make it down to the Andre Clark Bird Refuge, which, from a capybara's perspective, is paradise. The zoo kept the escape hush-hush and soon enough, joggers around the bird refuge were calling animal control reporting a ginormous rat! So, animal control gets involved and the zoo finds out that they're going to drug the beast, which might've lead to it drowning, so that plan was nixed. Instead a trail of bananas was laid out, to a trapping pen.
Finally the beastie was captured. Did they use the intervening time to fix the enclosure? Evidently not, because he escaped AGAIN. The second attempt at capture took much, much longer because evidently capybaras are quick studies and he didn't fall for that entire banana routine quite as easily. I seem to recall it took two weeks to recapture him that time.
Finally, they sold him to another zoo.
What I'm thinking about is that some decided to stay and make it a home, while others went straight for the exits.
I wonder if you put 4 dozen people in shipping container for a few days, then drop them off in a sterile and foreign place (a city suburb), how many would stay, how many would look for any way to escape.
Do they know they are captives, and are resigned to that life (like death camp internees), or do they believe this is all natural and life how it should be ?
Sorry, I'm over thinking this. I've been under amazing stress, and I admire those little suckers who did their best to get out. To where, they don't know, just as long as it's away.
They obviously don't like being locked up, so why do we hold them as prisoners?
No offense intended jay but your story made me sick to my stomach.
That's an aboolutely revolting, horrific, disgusting and frigging evil thing.
Bleh. *off to find a unicorn chaser*
As my dad used to say, if water can get through, so can a rodent! I can't say I'm surprised they got out so fast!
Prairie Dogs also do a large amount of damage to the ground, just like other burrowing rodents. The tunnels are death to larger animals, horses, cows etc. They also carry bubonic plague, and rabies, so as harsh as it is, population control is the only way. wish it was different, but when an animal no longer has a predator (thanks to us) we have to take up the slack and keep the population in check.
Prairie Dogs are very susceptible to Bubonic plague so keeping their populations under control is of concern. Their tunnels also cause livestock and horses to break legs. They are cute, but they are rodents. Also, because Ranchers have a long history of cutting down on wolf and coyote populations, the rodents flourish.....so thar you go boss. It is all about balance. More coyotes, less rodents.
In response to anonymous' request for the problems of prairie dogs that in addition to having a propensity to explode in population and turn good farmland into scorched earth, the holes of their dens are particularly nasty for horses to stick their feet in and break a leg.
As for the effectiveness of these derbies, I'm sure it helped but the populations were so entrenched there wasn't really any way of getting rid of the things. Like cockroaches where I live now, you have to spray once a year because they just come back.
In times between derbies you cold find an elderly farmer who might give you $20 to pay for ammunition if you politely asked if you could shoot the prairie dogs on his land.
As to #22 Talia who was disgusted by my story, I fully understand your viewpoint, but I grew up in a setting where a fun weekend was heading down to the field a few miles away and shoot a couple rabbits, skin them and cook them up for dinner. Or go to the Yellowstone river catch some fish, hack off the head, cut a slit from the poop hole up to the gills and pull all the guts out. A quick cleaning then wrapping it up in aluminum foil with some salt and lemon then a quick roast over the fire and you had dinner. Dressing a freshly killed deer was a bit more of a hassle, but I had deer hamburger for months afterwards and Antelope made particularly good jerky.
It's a different lifestyle with different viewpoints, in some ways it is more honest than living in a world where your beef, pork and chicken comes neatly trimmed and vacuum packed in styrofoam containers.
And to be honest, its nothing I participate in now. I haven't had any epiphany, but the whole shooting and killing and especially creeping around in the forest just doesn't have the appeal to me that it once did.
Prairie dog control is simple:
Black Footed Ferrets.
The zoo should start a ferret breeding program and keep the prairie dog enclosure in the middle of the ferret enclosure. If you have a prairie dog problem, don't poison (the lack of prairie dogs to eat via mass termintation is in large part responsible for making the BFF one of the most endangered animals) - apply for ferrets to be re-introduced on your land.
There was a good story in NZ a few years ago, when one of the otters escaped the enclosure at Auckland Zoo, and headed down a nearby stream. After several weeks of scattered sightings around the the harbour, she was eventually caught some 7km away.
The Rodenator solves the prarie dog problem without poison by filling the tunnels with flammable gas and igniting it. :)
http://www.rodenator.com/pests-controls-videos-rodenators
Rock On.
Wmbozarth: Nothing could possibly go wrong with that...
if I lived in a rat-infested, old city, I'd shoot rats. If I lived on a ranch, I'd shoot prairie dogs.
Nothing personal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv87T1CQF8E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5yCwN7wymc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrwMjThKQ_g
Did anyone else RTFA and learn that it used to be the kodiak bear habitat? You would think that if a kodiak bear habitat wasn't escape-proof, someone would have noticed eventually.
Prairie dogs are a 'keystone' spcies--one that so many other species depend on (at least 200 in this case, almost certainly not counting many insects that in turn others, especially birds, depend on) that without them, the regional ecosystem, plants and animals both, can collapse. scholar.googling for "prairie dog keystone species" will turn up 1400+ articles. If you don't have access to the full texts, a regular google search will turn up 12000+, though you'll have to wade though more generalities to get to the good bits. Note that because of the endangered species aspects, you'll also find a lot of articles basically saying the opposite. Follow the money, and you'll find that as usual, science has not actually been suspended, just repressed yet again.
Prairie dogs do not reduce grazing for cattle. On the contrary, cattle often prefer to graze near prairie dog towns. P.d.s eat different plants than cattle do, and the digging and droppings significantly improve the soil, so that there's not only a higher percentage of the plants that cattle do like to eat, but those plants are more productive than away from p.d. towns.
Philanthus
I, for one, welcome our new wily prairie dog overlords. As I can farm, I could be quite useful, and see no need to be killed along with the rest.
Viadd @35 Did anyone else RTFA and learn that it used to be the kodiak bear habitat? You would think that if a kodiak bear habitat wasn't escape-proof, someone would have noticed eventually.
Last I checked, prairie dogs were a little smaller than kodiak bears, so presumably they can get out in ways a bear couldn't.
I always loved the prairie dogs at the Maryland zoo when I was a kid. We even "adopted" one when I was in kindergarten. I didn't understand that we were just making a donation to help pay for the care of the animal, not bringing it home to live with us, so I wanted to pick something small and cute. :)
I don't know if the Salisbury zoo still has prairie dogs, but they basically gave up on trying to contain them in their exhibit. They just dug tunnels under the wall and kind of ran around the whole zoo.
It occurs to me that prairie dogs, chipmunks and gophers were around millions of years before the farmers peppered the earth with a million tons of lead trying to kill them all. The varmints didn't seem to cause a problem. Au contraire, they turn the earth and aerate the soil, so they are a crucial part of the ecology, along with the earthworms and bacteria.
The hard packed clay caused by removing the earth turning varmints, the duststorms, topsoil erosion and the enormous forest fires WE cause seem to be the bigger issue.
As the former "mom" of a late, lamented prairie dog (when it was still legal to keep them as pets), I just want to correct one thing. Prairie dogs do indeed carry plague (though, like my pet, can be quarantined for a few days to see if they have it), but they do NOT carry rabies. That is just untrue.
If the Maryland Zoo wants to see how to keep p-dogs, they should talk to the folks at the Virginia Zoo in Norfolk. They have successfully kept them for years, and they appear happy and healthy. The secret: glass walls!
Yeah, we could bring in ferrets, then when that population got out of control, bring in wolves, then when that population got out of control, tigers, and when that population got out of control, gorillas. Then we could eat the gorillas. Or elephants. They could stomp them out, right? And elephants taste better. I think. (or not.)
Silly humans.