Aww, look at the cute little prai—MY GOD, WHAT IS IT DOING TO THAT SQUIRREL???
Here’s the most troubling quote from the article in Gizmodo about a biologist’s startling discovery that prairie dogs routinely kill baby ground squirrels because they don’t like baby ground squirrels…after all, they are herbivores:
“Pop culture loves to portray herbivores as peace-loving pacifists—just look at Zootopia as the latest example of this—but who can say what other barbarous acts are going undocumented in our backyards? Are rabbits stealing into burrows to throttle chipmunks in their sleep? Do elk and buffalo lose their cool and impale each other over prairie grass? These are the sorts of unsettling questions biologists will have to start asking.”
The reason those questions will be asked is the work of biologist John Hoogland of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. His observations of prairie dogs, resulting in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, indicate that the cute, fuzzy mammals “will chase ground squirrels—usually babies—and if they catch them, they shake them violently. While they’re shaking, they’re biting the back of the neck to sever the vertebral column. Sometimes they grab by the head and literally debrain the baby. It’s violent, savage, and awful.”
There is a reason for this violence: ground squirrels and prairie dogs compete for the same grasses as food. It is the first known instance of a mammalian herbivore killing another mammalian herbivore on a routine basis, and Hoogland’s research indicates that it’s “just business”: the fewer ground squirrels there are; the more food there is for the prairie dogs and their young.
Clearly, prairie dog society is organized according to extreme utilitarian principles: the ends justify the means….at least when it comes to ground squirrels.
I think the ground squirrels should build a wall.
Ethics Alarms 
But what does the prairie dog version of Jack Marshall have to say about this? And the ground squirrel version?
(thanks for the silliness, I’ve been dealing with way too many phone calls this morning and needed a break)
I couldn’t resist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0TxlpW8Ico
Well what goes down comes around. Coyotes and badgers love to eat prairie dogs: http://goodnature.nathab.com/coyotes-and-badgers-incorporated/
How does that work? WGACA would mean something eats coyotes and badgers. “They eat us, so we are justified killing the babies of a completely different species”?
Now I’m wondering if that cliche belongs on rationalization list..The Prairie Dog’s Defense.
Well, here’s another interesting fact according to Wiki: Coyotes only natural enemies besides humans are cougars and wolves. However wolves sometimes breed with coyotes and the offspring is a coywolf. No and I’m not pulling your leg.
It’s the horse’s fault.
Trouble is closer to home than Jeff knows. Pigeons have adjusted to urban life and all but lost the ability to flock (cooperate or share) or fly long distances. They are inevitably overfed, and overfed pigeons do only one thing: they breed. Thanks to feasts at every curbside and ignorant bird-people like Mary Poppins’ pal who think city ordinances a joke, feral pigeons now automatically attack other approaching birds, regardless of the abundant food supply, and if the invader perseveres, have been known to peck their necks or throats until they die. They have begun to expand their menus to the point where Tippi Hedron would run and scream quite effectively without Hitchcock’s direction.
Gulls, once seaside scavengers, have begun to roost far inland and regularly wound the heads of bald men (so funny until the blood runs), steal school lunches (nipping brutally at any child-finger that gets in the way), and cannibalize their own and other bird and animal species according to their growing carnivorous appetites while ignoring the actual human garbage there for the taking. More and more frequently, they kill as murderers rather than predators, abandoning the corpses on the sidewalk. Or just torture the victim while a friend looks on.
Are dire warnings about global warming just a cover-up for vegetarians to prepare to take charge? Isn’t the real ethical question whether the end – being the published report – was worth or even necessary to the means? Don’t we need to know whether it was appropriate to observe secretly, cold-eyed, as 163 murders took place in Wyoming and Colorado? Wouldn’t fifty have done? Or even twenty-five? How gory is Truth, after all? Moreover, we need to know if prairie dog-on-ground-squirrel is just a herbivore-on-herbivore aberration or if there is true homicidal intent, the survival of a small pool of psychopathic butchers with powerful recessive genes who are breeding generations of killer P-dogs prepared, at a characteristic chittering signal, to swarm underneath Donald Trump and transport him willy-nilly to the Oval Office, thence to pronounce mad-bird and Rodent Rule upon the Earth. What of Ethics then?
No, the birds already voted. They are Sanders fans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8hYU46B818
“I think the ground squirrels should build a wall.”
And make the Prairie Dogs pay for it!
You get bonus points—I left that out specifically to see who would make the required addendum. Bravo.
Thank you. Seemed rather obvious, actually…nowhere else really to go.
I kept coming back to it, but didn’t see the obvious. Good on you, drag.
Useful info. Maybe I’ll bring in some prairie dogs to control the ground squirrels at our house in Arizona. They’re cute but you wouldn’t believe the amount of material they can move around. Of course, the prairie dogs are worse in that regard. We’d probably have to bring in some Colorado ranchers to control the prairie dogs. It’s my understanding shooting prairie dogs is a totally unregulated sport, er, activity in Colorado.
Also, Texas.