Why would anybody want to kill a prairie dog? They are cute as can be.
And small.
And make holes that break the legs of horses and cattle. And damage farmland.
Target practice.
I have shot tens of thousands of prairie dogs.
Because it is a lot of fun, the best long range practice and they are a pest.
Other then that no reason.
And carry Bubonic plague.
Have some friends that farm in Oklahoma panhandle.
They have a 90 acre prairie dog town. The pest destroy farm and ranch land.
There are services that use a sewer cleanup system to capture thousands of prairie dogs in their underground city and release them in uninhabited areas.
https://gizmodo.com/this-giant-vacuum-sucks-prairie-dogs-right-out-of-their-1668265973
This Giant Vacuum Sucks Prairie Dogs Right Out of Their Holes
By Andrew Tarantola 12/09/14 11:40AM
For years, prairie dogs have been the bane of cattle ranchers, whose livestock are routinely injured when stepping in prairie dog holes. In response, ranchers have gassed, poisoned, drowned, or buried entire colonies alive. But one enterprising pest control company has devised a more humane method of removing the rodents—with a modified sewer cleaning truck.
Prairie dogs are an iconic animal of the American West—right up there with deer, bison, and elk—but like so many other native species, prairie dogs have come under increasing pressure from human expansion—first by ranchers and cattle farmers, now by urban developers. At the turn of the 20th century, prairie dog habitats spread over an estimated 700 million acres from Mexico to Montana—the largest of which was a 25,000 square mile “town” located in central Texas that housed more than 400 million individuals—but the animals have been utterly decimated by human activity, their population shrinking by as much as 98 percent since then.
The problem with conventional control methods is that, “without prairie dogs, there would be no other wild species on the prairie at all,” Paula Martin, vice president of the Prairie Ecosystem Conservation Alliance (PECA), told Philly.com. But that’s where the Dog Gone vacuum truck comes in.
Built by Gay Balfour of Cortez, CO, the system utilizes a modified sewer-clearing truck to generate suction though a 4-inch diameter length of plastic tubing. Simply insert the tube into a prairie dog burrow, turn on the suction, and wait for the 2 pound critters to get hoovered up into the waiting holding tank. They system produces a high amount of suction and is able to whisk the rodents up the pipe at speeds topping 60 mph, though baffles at the containment truck slow do them down to 15 mph before exiting the pipe and softly tossing them against the padded walls of the holding tank.
And while some animal rights groups have claimed that the system kills and maims a large number of the dogs, “From what I saw, they seemed fine—more dizzy than anything else, “Scott Dutcher, head of the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Protection, told the Chicago Tribune. “We have received no complaints. Common sense tells you that there are no easy ways to get a prairie dog out of its hole.”
Once inside the air-conditioned truck, the dogs are doused with flea powder and kept fed with a supply of carrots and grain as they are being relocated. Originally, many of the prairie dogs were shipped throughout the American West for use as a food source for the black-footed ferret. The ferrets have also faced near annihilation at the hands of man, but recent reintroduction programs have begun to rebuild their populations and the prairie dogs—one of their favorite prey—has been instrumental in doing so.
They are high on the pest scale. Poison is too random. Because the holes they dig, LOTS OF THEM, break cattle legs, and the cattle have to be put down?
The holes destroy ag machinery, so, what is your pleasure? Eating or cute. Choose one.