Protecting Prairie Dogs

A Utah district court has ruled that the Endangered Species Act has exceeded Congress’ authority to regulate private landowners. In a case involving the Utah prairie dog, which was listed as a threatened species in 1973, the court said that since prairie dogs were involved in interstate commerce, the federal government had no Constitutional authority to regulate them.

Ironically, the main threat to the Utah prairie dog before it was listed was none other than the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which had the dual job of protecting endangered species and endangered pestiferous species. For decades, the Fish & Wildlife Service had poisoned prairie dogs throughout the West, saying they were bad for farmers and ranchers.

This poisoning continued even after the agency declared the black-footed ferret to be “the most endangered mammal in North America.” As it happens, black-footed ferrets get 99 percent of their food by eating prairie dogs, as well as make their homes in former prairie dog dens, but this didn’t stop the agency from poisoning prairie dogs.

When Utah prairie dog numbers fell to about 3,300 animals in 1972, the Fish & Wildlife Service listed it as threatened, and stopped poisoning them. Utah prairie dog numbers quickly recovered, and were estimated to exceed 8,000 in number by 2004. However, the feds continued to poison other prairie dogs throughout the West, leaving the black-footed ferret as endangered as ever. (The sordid story of the black-footed ferret is recounted here.)
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Despite the Fish & Wildlife Service’s best efforts to extirpate prairie dogs, conservative members of Congress didn’t trust it to not let its protective instincts take over, so in 1984 Congress transferred the wildlife-killing mission to the Department of Agriculture, which euphemistically called the new agency the “Wildlife Service.” Even after Utah prairie dog numbers recovered, the Fish & Wildlife Service–the real one–kept it listed so the newly formed Wildlife Service didn’t go wild and start poisoning them again.

As a listed species, the Fish & Wildlife Service wrote a recovery plan that forbade not only other federal agencies but private landowners from killing prairie dogs. The Antiplanner isn’t certain this was necessary; without the virtually unlimited resources of the federal government, private landowners would have a difficult time affording the cost of completely wiping out prairie dogs. But the Endangered Species Act doesn’t allow the Fish & Wildlife Service to determine whether measures are cost-effective or even truly necessary to protect listed species; instead, if it is listed then the most expensive measures to protect a species are all deemed legally required.

If the district court’s ruling is upheld on appeal, then the Fish & Wildlife Service will have to find a different way to protect prairie dogs. It could somehow make prairie dogs valuable, giving private landowners a reason to keep them around. It could pay private landowners not to poison them, something that might not even cost much as the damage prairie dogs do to range lands is probably vastly overestimated. It could create prairie dog reserves on federal lands–and there are a lot of federal lands in southern Utah where the Utah prairie dog lives. Or it could find private wildlife groups to pay the landowners and/or buy private lands to become prairie dog reserves.

In general, the Antiplanner believes many rare species of wildlife would be better off if protected by private parties than by the federal government. The district court ruling could lead to that outcome, which would be better for both private landowners and the wildlife.