Reporter
Git Along . . .
Why should Lubbock finally embrace its most dreaded pest? Because prairie dogs could be the city's biggest draw since Buddy Holly.
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Prairie dogs were never completely wiped out in Lubbock, however. In fact, there are still at least fifty colonies in Lubbock County. And as zealous as the city has been in the past century about eliminating them, its citizens have made fleeting attempts to embrace their local pest. In 1938 a civic booster named K. N. Clapp founded Prairie Dog Town in Lubbock's Mackenzie Park. Now home to some 750 dogs, the park's creation was a dual acknowledgment of the animal's status as a symbol of the Old West and the simple truth that Lubbock still had a whole lot of them. Later, a town mascot named Prairie Dog Pete was adopted by the chamber of commerce. But today, about the only mention of Pete or Prairie Dog Town is the photo that runs on the front page of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal every February 2, Groundhog Day, accompanied by a report on whether or not Pete saw his shadow when he came out of his hole.
Besides these lukewarm shows of affection, Lubbock has never really overcome the idea of prairie dogs as anything other than "range rats." Among farmers and ranchers, dogs are still considered vermin as lowly and destructive as rattlesnakes or locusts because they compete with cattle for forage, devouring any and all vegetation down to the roots. Their burrow holes are also open invitations for broken legs for horses and cows, and obstructions to plows. Worst of all, like real rats, prairie dogs are hosts to the fleas that carry bubonic plague.
At the height of the extermination controversy last summer and fall, one barometer of how many locals felt about the prairie dogs was Local and Live, the morning show on KRFE-AM 580, hosted by Wade Wilkes and Holly Houston. A favorite of Mayor McDougal's, the show was a haven for those of the lock-and-load opinion, and it received hundreds of calls defending the city's extermination plan, an opinion shared at the time by the hosts as well as many individual landowners and local corporate entities.
But protests against extermination would never have gained traction if prairie dog opinion hadn't begun to soften. Ryan Blakley, the owner of Walter's World of Pets, in downtown Lubbock, likes to think that he's partly responsible for the shift. Walter's is where Lynda Watson wholesales many of the prairie dog pups she captures, and during the squabble, Blakley called up Local and Live and challenged Wilkes to take home a free pet dog. Wilkes accepted his challenge and quickly grew attached to the animal, which he named Maxine. Now he and Houston endorse the relocation plan and have even begun promoting the idea of a Prairie Dog Roundup, modeled after Sweetwater's Rattlesnake Roundup.
"Once you get an animal that recognizes its name, their owners tend to be very emotional," explained Blakley when I visited his store. He was cradling his own pet dog, Balloo. "I don't think the city was prepared for the controversy. But when you can make an animal into a pet in a place where they're considered vermin, that says something about their quality."
INDEED LUBBOCK NEVER REALLY SEEMS prepared for controversy. In the past two years, in addition to the prairie dog fiasco, Lubbock made the news for the death of a SWAT team member from friendly fire, a Texas Tech professor accused of lying about missing vials of bubonic plague, and a lawsuit claiming that another Tech professor had required his students to accept evolutionary theory in order to receive a recommendation. For a city that has never settled on a great way to market itself (current slogan "Legendary Lubbock" doesn't really do the trick), the controversies have only made matters worse. Maybe embracing the dreaded prairie dog could be the first step to reinventing its flagging image. "America's Prairie Dog Capital" does have a certain ring to it.
After all, five miles west of Lubbock's City Farm, a prairie dog colony still thrives in Mackenzie Park. When the sun is out and the ground is warm, the squirrellike residents amuse onlookers with their animated social interaction, standing erect on hind legs to live up to their Sentinel of the Plains nickname. The dogs are undeniably cute and become particularly friendly when baby carrots are tossed their way. For those who might crave more excitement, there's the occasional hawk or owl swooping down to snatch a dog for breakfast. The place has all the makings of a great attraction.
Unfortunately, the town is suffering from serious neglect. The seven-and-a-half-acre site is rubble-strewn and largely devoid of vegetation. Its perimeter is littered with plastic bottles, cans, and wrappers. It's clear that whoever is in charge of its budget gave up long ago on the idea of people stopping to gawk at rodents. But they do. It's rarely mentioned in visitor guides, but Prairie Dog Town draws thousands of visitors every year. For the group of junior ambassadors from Lubbock's sister city Musashino, Japan, the park is a must-stop on their annual visits. Prairie dogs are a top-selling pet in Japan, in no small part because of their similarity to the cartoon character Pokémon. A rancher in Canadian, 216 miles to the northeast, has seized on this potential. For the past couple years, he's been putting Japanese and other tourists in a gooseneck stock trailer and driving them to the middle of a prairie dog town on his property. He leaves them there for a few hours and charges $50 each for the experience.
"Some people in [Lubbock] haven't gotten to the point of thinking about nature as a tourist attraction," explains Russell Graves, the author of The Prairie Dog: Sentinel of the Plains and a proponent of marketing dogs. "But for a lot of people living outside Lubbock, all they know about Lubbock is prairie dogs. I think some of the city leaders need a paradigm shift."
For inspiration, Lubbock could do worse than study Austin's recent history with Mexican free-tailed bats. In 1980, when that city completed a reconstruction of the Congress Avenue Bridge, a colony of bats began inhabiting the cavernous concrete supports underneath. To city managers, the small flying mammals were rabies-carrying pests, but to Merlin Tuttle, a museum curator in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the bats were an educational and tourist gold mine. Tuttle persuaded the city's leadership to leave the bats alone, in part by moving his organization, Bat Conservation International, to Austin in 1986. Through his group's effort to promote bat viewing, up to a thousand visitors can be found congregating at the Congress Avenue Bridge at dusk on summer weekends to catch a glimpse of the bats' nightly flights. In the span of twenty years, bats have been transformed from pests into beloved citizens. Even the town's minor league hockey team, the Ice Bats, has cashed in on their popularity.
In Lubbock, the leadership might be coming around to this idea. Mackenzie Park is finally scheduled for major infrastructure improvements, including an irrigation system, within the next year and a half. But why stop there? If Japan is any indication, there could be vast, untapped prairie dog pet markets in the rest of Asia, South America, or Europe. The City Farm could be the cornerstone of a massive prairie dog exportation scheme, a place to generate a yearly crop of prairie dog pups. A plan like this is a long shot, of course, and it will require a visionary leader. Lubbock should look no further than Lynda Watson. Having carved a career out of prairie dog management, she might be the first local who has discovered a way to make what's good for prairie dogs good for humans.
The last time I saw her, Watson was continuing her tireless quest to trap six hundred prairie dogs, one animal at a time, on the City Farm. It is primarily grunt work; most of the time her customized prairie dog trap remains empty. But Watson is patient. As I left her, she was down on her hands and knees, peering into another burrow. "C'mon, dude," she whispered, "you really don't want to be in this hole. I'll be good if you come out right now. Make it easy on both of us."
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