Press Release
For Immediate Release: Thursday, August 29, 2002
Contact: Kim McKeggie, 202.265.7337
WHERE
WOULD YOU PUT 50,000 PRAIRIE DOGS?
Prairie Dog Committee
to Weigh In On Lubbock Eradication Plan
Lubbock,
TX--Members of an inter-governmental prairie dog planning team will
decide today whether to support plans by the city of Lubbock to eliminate
one of the largest prairie dog towns in the Southwest. A coalition of conservation organizations,
led by Texas Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Texas
PEER) is presenting the Black-tailed Prairie Dog Working Group of
Texas a resolution to oppose the removal, citing a lack of scientific
justification.
The City of Lubbock
has unveiled a plan for “relocation” of the estimated 50,000 prairie
dogs but provides no description of how that would be carried out
or where they would be moved. Unless all the dogs can be “humanely”
moved, the plan calls “chemical and/or concussive control” to exterminate
the colony.
The Texas Natural
Resources Conservation Commission (TNRCC) and city officials blame
prairie dogs for increased pollution into the water table underneath
the Lubbock Land Application Site where the city has been applying
its wastewater but neither the state nor the city have supported this
hypothesis with any scientific documentation.
The resolution, put
forward by a Texas PEER and a number of conservation groups,
recommends that TNRCC and the city of Lubbock refrain from removing
prairie dogs “unless and until they have developed sound scientific
evidence that the prairie dogs are responsible for any increases in
nitrate levels or other pollution at the LLAS.”
“The notion that prairie
dogs cause groundwater pollution is a real stretch of logic,” said
Texas PEER Director Scott Royder, noting that prairie dog burrows
rarely run deeper than 5 feet, while the water table sits between
50 and 90 feet underground. “The water table is in bad shape
from years of dumping wastewater, planting non-native grasses, and
allowing cattle to graze on the site.”
The Texas Prairie Dog
Working group was established in 1999 after the US Fish and Wildlife
Service made the controversial determination that while Black-tailed
prairie dogs deserved to be listed as a threatened species under the
Endangered Species Act but the agency lacked the money and staff to
make that designation. The goal of the group is to ensure that
prairie dog populations continue to increase without federal protection.
“It’s pretty clear
that destroying tens of thousands of prairie dogs is not going to
help recover a species on the brink of extinction,” concluded Royder.
###
Read the prairie dog resolution.
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78767-1522
Tel: (512)
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