A small rodent could hold the key to the Senate THE black-tailed prairie dog has never been a political animal. For centuries, on South Dakota’s vast and mysterious plains, it has played no part in the state’s momentous events. You will find no reference to it in accounts of how General George Custer’s troops were massacred at the Battle of Little Bighorn, or of the US Army’s bloody revenge on the Sioux at Wounded Knee. But in a graphic demonstration of the axiom that all politics is local, South Dakota’s prairie dog, a fluffy, slightly gormless rodent, has suddenly landed...