The new plan states part of its purpose is to “place greater emphasis on control and active management of prairie dog colonies to address significant concerns related to health, safety, and economic impacts on neighboring landowners.”

Johnathan Proctor, Rockies & Plains program director for Defenders of Wildlife, said the purpose is to gut the minimal protections that now occur.

For Pellatz, whose family has ranched in the Thunder Basin area for more than a century, the solution is somewhere in between.

“In most of life you have people saying it’s going to be terrible and on the opposite side you have folks who say, ‘the only good prairie dog is a dead prairie dog, and we don’t want any of them,’” he said. “We walk somewhere in the middle. I can see both perspectives. I think that the opportunities do exist for trying to maintain a little more balance and perhaps a little more wholistic approach.”

Unfortunately, said Proctor, in this proposed plan prairie dogs – and other species – lose.

“Prairie dogs are an ecosystem. They are a key part of the Great Plains of North America and 95 percent of that is gone,” Proctor said. “These are multiple use lands that wildlife is a part of it, and they’re writing them off the land.”