Local Ranchers Call For Lethal Prairie Dog Control

BOULDER, CO -- Several local ranchers are expected to speak up at tonight's Open Space Board of Trustees meeting after voicing concerns that prairie dogs have taken over their lands and will run them out of business, the Daily Camera reports. The board is scheduled to be briefed on the Prairie Dog Working Group Phase II recommendations, and the session will include a public comment period.

"We've been hollering about it for years, that you've got to control these in the irrigated grounds," Dwayne Cushman, a self-described fifth-generation local rancher told the Camera, as prairie dogs have reduced his productive acreage. "There's got to be lethal control. We can't sustain without some lethal control, there is just no way."

Cushman isn't the only one impacted. According to 2018 data, nearly 1000 acres of irrigable farmland in Boulder County is overrun by the dogs.

The first phase of the working group's recommendations, completed in 2018, covered criteria for deciding where prairie dogs are moved to and from, and detailed best practices for creating sustainable habitat and preventing plague, the Camera reports. The second phase aims to create a long-term vision for the problem. However, according to a memo for tonight's meeting, over the next three to four years relocation is only feasible for about 10 percent of prairie dogs in the highest priority areas of conflict due to cost and a lack of suitable alternative habitat options.

Tom Isaacson, chair of the board of trustees explained the problem his group faces. "Given that there are significant conflicts between prairie dogs and agriculture on certain properties, and given staff's view that only a small portion of those conflicts could be solved through relocation of the prairie dogs, the board needs to have a conversation about what to do about the conflict areas that can't be addressed through relocation," he told the Camera.

Read the full story from the Daily Camera here.

The full meeting, provided it is held despite an incoming winter storm, will be livestreamed on Boulder's Channel 8.