The battle to save Boulder’s prairie dogs has been wicked. Members from Keep Boulder Wild (www.keepboulderwild.org) attended a city council meeting well into the wee hours of the morning on Tuesday. The prairie dog agenda item didn’t even come up until 12:45 a.m. Keep Boulder Wild took out an ad in the Boulder Weekly and is anticipating coverage of the Boulder prairie dog issue in today’s edition. Dave Crawford was also interviewed by Channel 2 news prior to the City Council Meeting. RMAD and Keep Boulder Wild also represented the animals last week on KGNU’s Over-Dub.

From Dave:

“Progressive” Boulder’s Regressive Wildlife Policies
City Moving from Bad to Worse

On Tuesday evening (June 6) at the Boulder City Council meeting, our fears for Boulder’s urban/suburban prairie wildlife were confirmed. City staff and city council presented a fully unified front in their determination to kill prairie dogs at Tom Watson Park and Valmont Park. The killing is scheduled to begin in early July. The plan is to flush the animals from the ground, then kill them with CO2. So the prairie dogs born this spring will never feel the fall air or experience the comfort of snuggling with family on a winter evening. They’ll just die what is likely a terrifying death at the hands of paid exterminators before they reach 6 months of age, right here in the friendly little hamlet of Boulder, Colorado.

If this plan is carried out, the face of Boulder will forever change. Still, not everyone’s upset. The many developers who contributed to the campaign coffers of these council members are no doubt pleased by this … development.

Despite the fact that the prairie dog component of the city council meeting started at 12:45 AM (on June 7, that’d be), at least a dozen advocates were still present to hear city staff audaciously offer advocates the opportunity to move the animals if advocates can find a release site – before the end of June.

What’s more, the UWMP, in particular, categorically dismisses the substantial public input gathered by city staff during the plan’s initial development. That input was overwhelmingly in favor of a humane approach.

Watson and Valmont are just the beginning. Without a substantial change in direction, the UWMP will devour one colony after another. All told, some 6000 prairie dogs – and countless animals who live with them – will lose their lives over the course of the next several years. For now, we expect between 200 and 560 deaths (of prairie dogs alone) in July.

A coalition of advocates is working diligently to secure a humane outcome. We are pulling out all the stops.

Stay current on this campaign at www.KeepBoulderWild.org, and feel free of course to contact us here at the office.