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A week after a Colorado state agency refused to ban shooting white-tailed prairie dogs, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday it will study the rodent to determine if it should be protected as an endangered species.
The decision was a vindication of efforts frustrated in 2004 to have the prairie dog protected, said Josh Pollock, conservation director for the Center for Native Ecosystems, who called the decision a “victory for sound science.”
The decision to study the white-tailed prairie dog population “opens a valuable opportunity for the scientific community to study for two years and find out what kind of population is out there in the ground.”
The decision to study the white-tailed prairie dog won’t have any effect on the Colorado Wildlife Commission’s decision last week to reject a proposed ban on prairie-dog hunting.
“Unfortunately, the white-tailed prairie dog is largely unprotected in the places they still live,” and the only federal action that would change that is listing the rodents as an endangered species, Pollock said.
The federal agency’s decision, however, didn’t sit well with Club 20, the Western Slope lobbying and promotional organization.
