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Prairie Dogs are cool!

Category : Pets & Animals

Type: Public Membership
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Founded: Nov 11, 2005 5:32 PM
Location: St. Paul
Minnesota-US
Member(s): 211
This group is for anyone who wants to try to save the prairie dog from extinction, owns one as a pet, or just thinks they are cute. :)

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Check out these sites for more info on prairie dogs:

http://www.desertusa.com/dec96/du_pdogs.html
http://www.prairiedogs.org/
http://www.prairiedog.info/
http://www.pbs.org/kratts/world/na/pdogs/
http://www.prairiedogcoalition.org/

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Fascinating Facts:

The biggest prairie dog town on record was found in West Texas. It was about 100 miles wide and 250 miles long, and the town was home to an estimated 400 million prairie dogs!

Prairie dogs got their name from their most common call, a short yip that sounds like a bark. Of course, prairie dogs arent dogs at all; theyre actually a species of squirrel.

A prairie dog burrow will often have 30-50 burrow entrances per acre!

Prairie dogs are known to have one of the most sophisticated forms of natural language ever decoded and can discriminate between airborne and ground predators, as well as individual humans dressed in different clothing.


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Some biologists estimate that prairie dogs once numbered 5 billion, roughly as many animals as were in the famous flocks of passenger pigeons. Now, prairie dogs are candidates for protection under the Endangered Species Act. In the late 1800s, prairie-dogs towns covered 100 million acres, but now the animals inhabit only 1 percent of their former range. The approximately 1 million acres of prairie-dog colonies remaining in the short-grass and mixed-grass prairies of the Great Plains are increasingly fragmented by urban sprawl, roads, and agricultural conversion.

Since prairie dogs eat grass and clip stalks around their burrows, some ranchers view them as competition for their livestock. Deemed a pest, the prairie dogs are poisoned and shot. Research now shows that rather than depleting grass, prairie dogs spur grass growth and are compatible with livestock grazing. Unregulated sport shooting further reduces prairie-dog numbers. Both state and federal governments subsidize eradication of prairie dogs, triggering the loss of entire prairie communities.



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