Dora Aravis

With regard to the prairie dogs that Larimer County wants to kill at the First and Denver site in Loveland, and the article that was in the Coloradoan, March 4, “Clock clicks down for Loveland prairie dog colony”: First, the reason there is no place to relocate these animals is that the county is unwilling to find suitable county land for them, land that we, the taxpayers, have bought and paid for, so they use every excuse they can find: Relocation doesn’t work, most die in the move, it is easier to kill than to relocate, it is cheaper to kill than relocate.

All if these reasons are totally wrong. Relocation does work, and it is as cost-effective as killing them. The city of Fort Collins, with the help of the Humane Society of the United States and the Prairie Dog Coalition, has proven this and will prove it again in the coming years.

The Larimer County commissioners are thinking in the context of the 19th century and not the 21st. They are unwilling to update this thought process and that is sick and wrong.

Prairie dogs are a keystone species that needs to be saved and not just for their own intrinsic value, but for their value to the species that depend on them. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has spent a lot time and money to try to save the Black Footed Ferret. The ferrets only eat prairie dogs. Why save the ferrets, only to wipe out their only food source? Or has no one ever thought of this basic fact?

Larimer County needs to rethink this wanton killing, and don’t tell me that it is a “very difficult situation”; it is that because the commissioners are unwilling to correct it.

Dori Aravis, Fort Collins