The rodents don’t need to be extinct. They only need to be thinned out enough to stop the Plague from spreading from one group to another. We don’t need a prairie dog town that spans the whole Rockies. There’s also a vaccine.
The barrier to controlling the problem is that of factions in politics that don’t want funding to go anywhere but to their members. They don’t want landowners killing the rodents, either, because they’d rather play emergency-rescue for $10,000 per ambulance ride (ambulance only, multinational ambulance interests).
Public corruption through socialism (fascism) is the problem.
If it’s thinned out enough they can’t spread disease from one group to the next then they’re thinned out enough they can’t spread genetic diversity between groups, and then they’ll have inbreeding problems, and then they’ll be extinct.
No, the barrier in controlling the problem is REALITY. The plague is endemic to every single rodent in the country. There is simply nothing that can be done about it. Might as well decide you want to make up down and the world fair. Not gonna happen.