On the Thunder Basin National Grassland of northeastern Wyoming, the livestock industry has been pursuing an aggressive campaign to expand poisoning and shooting of prairie dogs. And in 2020, the Forest Service gave them a plan amendment that radically expanded prairie dog killing, and eliminated a special designation of a Black-footed Ferret Reintroduction Area to boot. Yesterday, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Western Watersheds Project, Rocky Mountain Wild and WildEarth Guardians, and struck down the Forest Plan amendment.
Unfortunately, the court punted on the substantive claim, that the Forest Service is violating the Endangered Species Act and only ruled on the NEPA claims. So the Forest Service just needs to start the process over again.
The black-tailed prairie dog is a keystone species and ecosystem engineer, creating habitats and food for a variety of sensitive wildlife species. The burrowing owl and mountain plover nest in active prairie dog towns. Golden eagles and ferruginous hawks count the prairie dog as a key food source. Swift foxes and badgers rely on prairie dogs for food. And rarest of all is the black-footed ferret, an obligate predator of prairie dogs that lives only in its burrow complexes and feeds almost exclusively on prairie dogs. All but wiped out as collateral damage in the agriculture industry’s war to eradicate the prairie dog, ferrets now exist in only a tenuous handful of reintroduced populations scattered on a tiny fraction of their natural range.
The Thunder Basin is one of the few large blocks of public land where prairie dogs have been numerous enough to support a reintroduced population of black-footed ferrets. But the latest Grassland Plan amendment expanded prairie dog recreational shooting and poisoning, shrunk prairie dog population targets (even though the Forest Service classifies them as a Sensitive Species), and closed the door on ferret reintroduction and recovery.
Back in 2002, the Forest Service adopted a Grasslands Plan that restricted prairie dog poisoning on the Thunder Basin to cemeteries and the immediate area around homes and buildings. The plan also established a Black-footed Ferret Reintroduction area of more than 50,000 acres, where recreational shooting of prairie dogs was prohibited. But the livestock industry wanted to expand the prairie dog killing, especially on Forest Service lands adjacent to private inholdings.
So an association of ranchers pushed for a plan amendment to expand poisoning, and despite opposition from the leading conservation groups of the time, they got the concessions they wanted. Even though this plan was billed as a compromise, the livestock industry wasn’t satisfied. And in 2020, together with their allies at the State of Wyoming, they reneged on the “compromise” they themselves had brokered, and were able to exert enough pressure to compel the a Forest Service to adopt a new plan amendment, opening up almost all of the National Grassland to poisoning, deleting the Black-footed Ferret reintroduction area, and blocking plan components to protect prairie dogs from epidemics of sylvatic plague, a non-native disease from Eurasia that decimates prairie dog colonies.
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