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Earth First! Confronts the Slaughter on the Prairie
by Earth First!
Tuesday, Jun. 21, 2005 at 12:58 PM
sabthebastards@hotmail.com
Each year, 45,000 Gunnison’s prairie dogs are blasted away by sport hunters. On the opening day of Arizona’s 9-month hunting season, Earth First! was in the killing fields to expose the senselessness and brutality of the hunt. Apparently, however, only people who kill animals are welcome on this land. After only one day, Arizona Game and Fish Department officials informed an EF! film crew that we were being permanently banned from the ranch.
Each year, 45,000 Gunnison’s prairie dogs are killed by sport hunters, blasted away as they peek above their burrows. This goes on in spite of a pending petition to list the species as endangered. In Arizona, the majority of the killing takes place on the Navajo Nation’s 750,000-acre Boquillas Ranch. On the opening day of the state’s 9-month hunting season, Earth First! was in the killing fields to expose the senselessness and brutality of the hunt. Apparently, however, only people who kill animals are welcome on this land. After only one day, Arizona Game and Fish Department officials informed an EF! film crew that we were being permanently banned from the ranch.
The Gunnison’s Prairie Dog (GPD) is one of five species of prairie dog that inhabit North America. This foot-long, golden brown, colonial animal can be found in Arizona’s high deserts and mountain grasslands. Like all prairie dogs, the GPD is a keystone species, creating food and habitat for countless other species with its burrowing, feeding and excreting. A healthy prairie dog population is ESSENTIAL to a healthy prairie ecosystem.
The GPD has disappeared from 90% of its historic range across the United States. Of the suitable habitat that remains, 30% of it can be found in Arizona. Within the AZ territory only, the GPD has been extirpated from 98% of its former range. Historically, the GPD was found across four million acres in Arizona. Today that area has been drastically reduced to 100,000 acres. These facts strongly suggest that the GPD is treading the path towards extinction.
In addition, the Boquilllas Ranch is the only Arizona reintroduction site for the black-footed ferret, North America’s most endangered mammal. These predators rely on prairie dogs for 90% of their diet – so why do Game and Fish and the Navajo Nation allow white sport hunters to run rampant across the ferret’s habitat, blasting away its prey base?
Determined to expose the hunt for the ecologically unjustifiable travesty that it is, a film crew from Chuk’shon EF! and Phoenix EF! legally entered Boquillas Ranch on June 16. We began interviewing prairie dog hunters, as well as compiling evidence of illegal activity such as hunters locating or shooting prey from vehicles, firing across roads, or poaching protected species like turkey vultures. Armed with this information and with disturbing footage of disembowled and still-twitching prairie dogs, we planned (and still plan) to once again embarrass Game and Fish -- as we have formerly done by sabotaging (“sabbing”) their mountain lion and sandhill crane hunts, exposing how the wildlife agency ignores the non-hunting majority and the demands of sound ecology when setting hunt guidelines.
Clearly, we were doing something right. After only a day in the field, we were surrounded by Game and Fish vehicles. Although we had formerly spoken cordially with some of these same rangers, even directing them to the site of a poached turkey vulture, Game and Fish now informed us that the ranch “wants to encourage prairie dog hunting” and was asking us to leave. We confirmed that we were not being charged with any illegal activity, then agreed to leave the ranch – for now.
Of course, we were not breaking any laws or even being disruptive, and it is absurd that the only people being banned from the Navajo Nation’s ranch are the ones NOT killing animals. We will be challenging this ban, and we will definitely continue our project to expose the madness of this hunt.
Some of the hunters we spoke to boasted of their $3,000 rifles and of killing up to 50 prairie dogs a day. Others disparaged their own “sport,” saying, “this ain’t hunting – it’s just shooting.” All of them left the animals to rot where they lay. None of the hunters need to kill these animals for food – in fact, many of them come from out of state specifically for the opening day of the season! The hunters out there are killing just for fun, and they are killing hundreds of thousands of these animals a year.
When asked what he thought of the petition to list the species as endangered, one hunter snorted that there are “a milion bazillion of them out there. How could they be endangered?” Of course, the same logic led to the extermination of the great bison and pronghorn antelope herds from the plains. Back then, the genocide was intentional. Given Game and Fish’s heavy bias toward ranchers and hunters and the impossibility of getting good population figures on prairie dogs, who’s to say that Game and Fish doesn’t hope to wipe out the Gunnison’s entirely?
Game and Fish is used to operating without accountability or criticism, but Earth First! is changing that dynamic and challenging this good-ol’-boys club. We will be keeping the pressure on Game and Fish for all their unsustainable hunts, whether prairie dog, sandhill crane or bighorn sheep. Until Game and Fish realizes that the old days of killing wildife for fun are over and converts to an agency focused on conservation, Earth First! will be out there in the field to sab the bastards!
For more information, contact Chuk’shon EF!, sabthebastards@hotmail.com; or Phoenix EF!, phoenixef@excite.com.
See also:
http://arizona.indymedia.org/news/2005/05/26772.php
http://arizona.indymedia.org/news/2005/06/27876.php
http://arizona.indymedia.org/news/2005/06/27935.php