Personal Record -- Inaccuracy

[Bald1]

The question is where the heck are u hunting ? U and your partner saw/ shot at 100s of prairie dogs ????????

 

[BB57]

The question is where the heck are u hunting ? U and your partner saw/ shot at 100s of prairie dogs ????????

I can’t speak for the OP but I grew up in central and western SD. We had thousands in our south pasture north east of Onida (kept down in the several hundreds with my regular hunting). My uncle had thousands on his land about 15 miles further west.

When I lived in Winner SD in early adulthood there was plenty of public land with unwrought towns with thousands of prairie dogs on them, as well as tribal land on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations that you could hunt for the cost of an inexpensive tribal license.

That was before it became a big deal out of state destination hunter activity. Because of it prairie dogs see a lot more hunting pressure on public and tribal land, and are much more skittish, resulting in longer shots.

Many of the large towns on private lands all across western SD that we used to be able to hunt for free, and that saw almost no hunting, are now either managed for private for profit hunts, or have long since had their PD populations all but eradicated with poison.

A lot of the land in western SD is grassland well suited to cattle, but marginal at best for farming. Unfortunate over the last 50 years I’ve seen more and more of it broken up for farming, relying on irrigation and chemicals to get even marginal yields.

Some of the early CRP programs made it worse as land was broken up and cropped long enough to qualify for CRP, but dog towns were poisoned in the process and don’t usually recover years later when it’s enrolled as CRP grassland.

It’s certainly true that an over populated dog town will eat everything right down to the roots, but I’ve also seen ranchers who don’t recognize when they need to downsize a herd in a drought totally devastate their pastureland trying to carry way too many cattle in dry years. They end up with barren, dusty pasture followed by several years of weeds before the grass recovers.

We can shoot the prairie dogs, but we can’t do anything about ignorant and or incompetent ranching practices.