If you are a member of P.E.T.A. (People Eating Tasty Animals?) or believe that animals have more rights than humans, please stop reading now. I will not be held responsible for heart attacks, strokes, or any other ailment incurred by your angst over the following text. That said, on to the story.
Prairie dogs are a menace to any ranch. They are as close to dogs as cats are to chickens. They are a dumb rodent whose sole purpose in life is to dig holes and die, along with a little hanky-panky that creates thousands of copies. A pasture can be riddled with holes in less than a year. These oversized gophers eat roots and make the land worthless. It is especially dangerous to large animals such as cows or horses while moving at fast speeds over the prairie dog communities. Large animals often break legs when they fall in these holes. Once the prairie dogs invade, they don’t go away, so it is up to the rancher to get rid of them. Several methods are employed. Poison, hunting, or thermonuclear weapons are usually the best choices.
Poison is the pansy choice. It is too simple, but it also is bad for other animals that eat the dead rodents. We don’t have anything against hawks, ravens, or other such vagrants, so there is no reason to harm them.
One difficult method is hunting the critters. It is actually quite the activity full of excitement, loud laughter, and high fives. Quite the day for the local redneck. Prairie dogs have earned the nickname “pop-up targets.” They sit on their dirt mounds next to their holes and yip at each other. The hunter sits a hundred yards away with a high power rifle, preferably a .22-250 or a .220 caliber. These guns fling a projectile at 4000 feet per second. Impact is devastating. You know you hit one when you see the “pink cloud” and I’ve seen heads thrown 30 feet in the air. Good, down-home, Redneck fun. They are called pop-up targets because once a shot is fired, they all hide. Then one turns to the other and says, “What happened to Bob?” They all look at what is left of Bob, shrug their shoulders and say, “I have no idea; let’s take a look.” This continues until one of the sides gets bored and goes home for the night. Although fun, hunting takes too long.
We cowboys had pretty active imaginations when it came to fire and destruction. This was always increased when the planner was inebriated.
We, one of the cowboys and I, came up with a better idea for eliminating the rodents. We filled a 20 gallon propane tank, attached a long rubber hose, and inserted the hose down an active burrow. Propane settles in low places. It suffocates any animal that is caught in the gas. Unfortunately, it is also extremely flammable and explosive. Most of the burrows in a prairie dog community are inter-connected so our gas infiltrated many one and two bedroom apartments and a number of luxury suites in Prairie Dog Land.
We finished our gassing, rolled up the hose, and took the empty canister back to the truck; then my inebriated co-worker flipped his smoldering cigarette into one of the nearby holes.
All the available oxygen in the surrounding square mile seemed to be sucked down that one hole and a soft, but powerful sound emanated from the ground. As we dove under the truck, hundreds of square feet of dirt lifted off the ground and flew through the air. Blue flames shot 20 feet out of the holes and little barbequed prairie dogs rained down like manna from heaven.
We crawled from under the truck, brushed dirt and grass from our clothing and surveyed the damage. It looked like a breached ammo dump somewhere on the Mekong Delta. Whistling low, we turned to each other, grinned like hyenas and gave the high five. Definitely rednecks, mixed with a bit of MacGyver.
Comments
Post a Comment