The Black Footed Ferret

Black footed ferrets

One of the main problems with exterminating prairie dogs is the fact that the loss of prairie dogs ends up killing other animals as well. One example: the black-footed ferret. it completely depends on prairie dogs to survive. It does not know how to make its own home so it uses prairie dog homes. And the only food it eats is prairie dog! For a while we thought black footed ferrets were extinct but then we started finding them hiding for long periods of time in prairie dog homes. Humans captured them and brought them into captivity. We figured out how to breed them and now black-footed ferret populations have dramatically increased. Black footed ferrets are some of the hardest animals to breed in captivity.  The people who caught them did many many studies on how they breed in the wild and tried to make their cages as like that as possible.

It is illegal to kill black-footed ferrets, but if you kill a prairie dog town the black-footed ferrets will die with it. That means that it should be illegal to kill prairie dogs and maybe when the prairie dog coalition and I are trying to get the laws made so you cannot kill prairie dogs we could bring up that argument.

Black footed ferrets are nocturnal and hunt mainly at night; they sneak into prairie dog holes and eat them.

Though they look like domestic ferrets they are a whole different species, just as wolves are a different species than dogs! And cats are a completely different species than big cats such as Cheetahs and how farm pigs are really different from wild boars! 

So one more reason not to kill prairie dogs is to save the most endangered mammal in all of America.