Reply #6: How many is too many?

[malakai2]

Care to venture a guess? Some people like to play the "too many" game, then tell me that a dog per acre is too many. In some of the more dense and healthy sections I've surveyed, I've seen as many as 100-110 burrows per hectare, which works out to significantly more than one dog per acre. That's the kind of density that black-footed ferrets need to survive. Black-footed ferrets as recently as 100 years ago ranged from Canada to Mexico, western Arizona and Montana to eastern Nebraska. The entirety of global black-footed ferret habitat is now confined to 10 or 11 sites, only three of which have self-sustaining populations, totaling less than 500,000 acres. Something tells me the idea of "too many" is entirely a human construct, and has nothing to do with nature limiting prairie dog numbers with a disease that's only been here for 109 or so years.

Tularemia doesn't cause that kind of mass mortality. In fact, only a couple things do. Poisoning does, and plague, as in Black Plague, Yersinia pestis, does. And guess what? The prairie dog density can be exceedingly low and still sustain a plague outbreak, because the reservoir host isn't prairie dogs, it's a few species of rats and mice. Prairie dogs are an exceptionally poor plague host because it will kill them within two weeks of infection, usually more like five to seven days, with no exceptions. If you live west of the 100th meridian, and you see a sudden, nearly complete wipe out of a prairie dog town that hasn't been poisoned, it's almost certainly plague, as in Black Plague. Not some other plague, or the general dictionary term for a pestilence that kills everyone, but that one specific plague caused by that one species of bacteria.