Two Very Interesting Links from Coyote at the Dog Show

In the first, it appears that there will be some outstanding varmint shooting in the Boulder area if common sense finally overcomes the bunny-hugger mentality there and allows people to control prarie dogs on their own damned property. Seems that Boulder’s rodent-friendly policy is creating prairie dog boomtowns. Money quotes:

Heeding concerns of animal-rights activists, Boulder has been relocating prairie dogs to the greenbelt for years to protect them from extermination. Now the city that took the lead in controlling human population growth is bursting with prairie dogs.

No one knows exactly how many are out there. But one University of Colorado study indicated prairie dogs are living at a density of more than 27 animals per acre in the greenbelt, compared with between four and 14 per acre in undisturbed prairies.

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“We never went as far as the city went,” said Boulder County Commissioner Ron Stewart, who oversees 70,000 acres of county open space. The county does not accept prairie dogs from private lands.

While the county exterminates prairie dogs on open space in isolated cases, it mostly traps the excess animals and sends them as living kibble to ferret and raptor programs.

It’s “more in the natural scheme of things that prairie dogs are the food for a number of raptors,” Stewart said.

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But nature is likely to do the job (of reducing populations) — sooner, rather than later — through plague, (said Bryan Pritchett, the city’s wildlife biologist).

Plague rarely jumps from prairie dogs to humans, but it could leave a lot of dead rodents around,

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David Crawford, of Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Animal Defense, vows to fight any effort to kill prairie dogs in the greenbelt or anywhere else.

“We’re going to do our best to see that not one of them gets harmed,” said Crawford

Yes, I know that nobody’s going to allow shooting anywhere near occupied buildings, but this is the kind of idiocy that results when people go into full bunny-hug mode.

The second link is about the Brady Center giving Wyoming an “F” grade in “gun safety.” Read the whole thing, but the conclusion Swen draws is absolutely correct:

This leads me to suspect that the Bradys are concerned with keeping us safe from guns, rather than safe with guns — that ‘gun safety’, as they use the term, is just gun control by a different name.

Yes, and I’ve said that before myself.

I’ve gotta add Swen to the blogroll. (OK, that’s done! – Egad! He had me blogrolled already!)