The Superior Board of Trustees has decided, as Boulder recently did, that there is a limit to tolerance of those who would choose to continue to expand their numbers beyond the resources available to them. The prairie dogs that have been living and breeding in a 20-acre drainage south of Eldorado Drive have outgrown the boundaries created in 2005 for the colony. A bid has been put out for complete eradication of the animals there and the area will become a "no prairie dog" zone.
The swing from tolerance to eradication is the knee-jerk reaction to a flawed plan a year ago that presumed the dogs could live within the boundaries created. The animals predictably ate and made more little prairie dogs, and kept moving outward into previously untouched land, including people's yards. This inevitability should have been addressed with a plan to humanely exterminate smaller numbers of dogs as they approached certain boundaries, but instead a mindset of irresponsible wishful thinking/denial put them on a path towards their doom (at a cost of about $30,000). Maybe that was the plan all along.
Read about the cheering crowd when the decision was made in this week's Superior Observer.
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1 comment:
It should have been clear from the start that the doggies would outgrow their bounds and need thinning. Saddens me, not even a prairie dog fancier, that now the little buggers will all be killed off. In Africa, when the elephants get too numerous, they thin, they don't kill them all.
And I am sure that the praire dogs have been an education to the town!
Jack
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