THE PRAIRIE DOG.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 16512, 24 August 1921, Page 3

THE PRAIRIE DOG.

* AN AMERICAN PEST. Thousands of acres of land hitherto useless will be brought into cultivation, tor the prairie nog, the cause oi devastation, is going the way the buffalo went, and is disappearing from the Kansas prairies. The prairie dog and the crops which civilised people grow cannot live successfully in the same territory, and, says a New York correspondent, the result was that the inexorable rule had to bo applied to the former. It has been a long and expensive fight, extending over thirty years and costing many thousands of pounds. Cattlemen estimate that when all the land in Kansas was grazing the devastation caused .by the prairie dog was equal to a monetary loss of a million pounds a year, and with the breaking up of the grazing land into farms the loss from the ravages of these pests has been even greater. So great, indeed, was the menace that five years ago the Legislature directed the Kansas Agricultural College to try to find some method of eradication, and offered a bounty for the heads of all the dogs. A few years ago the prairie dog towns frequently covered several square miles, and had several million inhabitants, but to-day the largest dog town known to the State’s Agricultural Bureau covers less than 100 acres, and there are few towns covering as much as ten acres. In a few counties the people have so successfully dealt with the nuisance that they have reduced the number of dogs to less than 100, and these are allowed to remain in some isolated section as a relic of bygone days. After the State and individual farmers had spent large sums in investigations, a poison .bait was ijhind which did the work of extermination. It consists of grass and root 9 boiled in various powerful poisons, small handfuls of it being thrown into the holes of the prairie dogs out of the reach of other animals but directly in the path of the dogr*. In the last two years the Kansas Agricultural College lias produced 62(3,130 of the poisoned baits, which were snjfU eient to treat 42,649 acres of the infested lands, and cost over £12,000. The bait is sold to farmers at the actual cost of manufacture, and no ether organisation is allowed to make or sell it. During last winter the extremely light demand for the bait indicates that the dogs are becoming very scarce, and that thousands of acres of land hitherto rendered useless by the burrows of the dogs will become more productive and profitable.