Three environmental groups filed a lawsuit yesterday challenging the Fish & Wildlife Service for its failure to recover the black-footed ferret, an animal the agency once called “the most endangered mammal in North America.” The three groups — WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, and Rocky Mountain Wild — argue that the agency has not taken the steps needed to save the ferret in Wyoming.
Black-footed ferrets peer out of a burrow that was probably dug by prairie dogs. The ferrets rely on prairie dogs for both food and shelter. Fish & Wildlife Service photo by Kimberly Fraser.
As I noted in a recent policy brief (and as described in much more detail in this 1996 report), the ferret relies on prairie dogs for both food and shelter, but ranchers have convinced both the federal and state governments to poison prairie dogs by the tens of thousands. For the first decade after the Endangered Species Act was passed, the leading poisoner of prairie dogs was the Fish & Wildlife Service itself, whose aggressive anti-prairie dog campaigns had already eliminated the animal from 95 to 98 percent of its historic range.
In other words, the agency that was supposed to protect the species was the main cause of its near-extinction. The Fish & Wildlife Service stopped killing prairie dogs only because in 1984 Congress transferred that job to the Department of Agriculture, which killed more than 64,000 of them in 2020.
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The most important step the Fish & Wildlife Service could take towards recovering the ferret would be to ban the poisoning of prairie dogs on federal lands. The only place it has done so is Utah when it declared the Utah prairie dog to be a threatened species. The Utah population quickly recovered when the poisonings stopped, but black-footed ferret ranges don’t overlap with Utah prairie dog ranges. Instead, the ferret depends mainly on the black-tailed prairie dog, which was the victim of nearly 88 percent of poisonings conducted by the Department of Agriculture in 2020.
Many black-tailed prairie dogs live in Wyoming, 48 percent of whose land is federal. The issue in the lawsuit is that the F&WS is allowing Wyoming to continue to kill prairie dogs. The press release for the lawsuit doesn’t say so, but many of the prairie dogs killed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture were also in Wyoming.
The story of the black-footed ferret puts the lie to claims that the Endangered Species Act has been successful or even that it is the most powerful environmental law ever passed. In fact, the Fish & Wildlife Service couldn’t use the law to stop itself, and later its cousin agency in the Department of Agriculture, from killing prairie dogs. I wish the environmental groups well with their lawsuit but hope that it will also teach them why reforms of the law could do much more to save endangered species.
Western ranchers = welfare queens
As with most suits brought by environmental groups, this will be settled by the government agencies agreeing to “help” the ferret and by the government paying the environmental groups millions of dollars.