Decision to kill Lubbock prairie dogs 
met with outrage
Bad day down on the farm

10/05/2002

By LEE HANCOCK / The Dallas Morning News

The same state agency that recently ordered extermination of thousands of prairie dogs at a Lubbock wastewater farm to prevent water pollution previously blamed the site's pollution woes on years of city mismanagement.

The city has sprayed wastewater at the farm east of town for decades, and since the mid-1990s, state environmental officials have blamed poor management and noncompliance with state orders for the persistent and possibly worsening groundwater pollution.

But state regulators – and city leaders – have now decided there is another pollution culprit: prairie dogs – tens of thousands of them that have prospered on the 6,000-acre farm.

Officials have decided the solution is to get rid of all the animals – and fast.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality ordered the city in June to come up with a plan to "control" or exterminate all the prairie dogs. City officials had been lobbying other state and federal agencies since 1999 for help in justifying getting rid of the animals, so they didn't wait for the official order from Austin before soliciting exterminators.

Environmental groups and state and federal wildlife agencies were outraged by the city's resulting plan to poison or blast 40,000 of the animals by winter's end.

Groups ranging from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to the Audubon Society and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility are trying to save what they believe is the Southwest's largest community of black-tailed prairie dogs, which are in such decline that they have been proposed since 1999 for federal threatened species status.

Federal and state wildlife agencies have argued that prairie dogs are being made scapegoats and that killing them is scientifically and environmentally unjustified.

"I'm surprised, to be honest with you, that TCEQ hasn't backed down," said Paul B. Robertson, a wildlife science chief at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. "This is going to be a black eye for the city of Lubbock. It's not like there's a crisis here. The place has been in violation forever."

But Lubbock officials are adamant that they're within their rights to kill them.

"This is a farm, f-a-r-m. Not a prairie dog town," said Dan Dennison, the city's environmental officer. "In retrospect, we should've gone out and done what everybody else does: quietly go out there and get rid of them."

TCEQ officials say seeing prairie dog holes so close to irrigation pipes convinced them that the critters had to go.

"We hear a lot about, 'Where's the science?' " said Pat Cooke, the inspector who recommended the extermination order. "Somebody mentioned, 'Why don't you just back off and let some researchers do some research?' Unfortunately, the situation would do nothing but get worse."

Lubbock began spraying sewage effluent on the farm in 1930s, and now sends in about 8 million gallons a day. So much was pumped in that a large pool was discovered about 70 feet underground in 1968. By the mid-1980s, city officials knew the pool had high concentrations of nitrates – a health hazard.

In December 1989, the state regulators found that the city's sewage spraying threatened groundwater. High nitrate concentrations had seeped so far into the area's aquifer that some neighbors were forced to quit using their wells for drinking water.

The city wanted to continue spraying instead of paying for more expensive treatment required for discharging into streams. Officials agreed to pump down the underground pool to reduce the nitrate buildup and carefully control irrigation.

Upsetting the balance

Beginning in 1997, state groundwater experts issued memos warning that the city was misapplying effluent, upsetting the balance required to prevent new groundwater pollution. Texas Tech University professor Cliff Fedler, who consulted on farm operations through the 1990s, warned in 1997 that the city's misapplication would cause nitrates to increase in the groundwater within three years.

"They could have done a better job of managing," said Dr. Fedler. "If they had, they wouldn't be where they are today."

State environmental agency memos over the next three years also warned that the city wasn't monitoring properly and was "engaged in serious deviations" from its state-approved plan that "may actually have contributed to worsening conditions."

In October 2000, the agency issued a formal notice that the city had violated its 1989 order.

In their response six months later, city officials argued that the farm's major problem was that the decade-old management plan – the same plan the state said the city hadn't followed – was outmoded and "ineffective."

In January 2002, a city engineering consultant concluded wastewater was being sprayed in some areas "faster than crops could absorb the nitrates." His analysis indicated that over half the land had been misused to the point that the city couldn't continue spraying sewage on it and comply with its state permit.

In April 2002, state regulators began targeting prairie dogs. They had never mentioned them as a problem, but city officials had been complaining to other state and federal agencies since 1999 that they were a growing nuisance.

Mr. Cooke, the Lubbock-based TCEQ inspector, toured the farm in April and decided the prairie dogs could be a pollution problem.

From wheat to rye

Few prairie dogs were there in 1996, but they moved in when the city shifted from crops such as corn and wheat to rye grass. Dr. Fedler, the engineering consultant, said he advised that rye grass was less effective at absorbing nitrates. But the farm manager switched to rent pastures for cattle grazing – a practice that earns the city about $500,000 a year. The change attracted prairie dogs, which thrive in the same conditions as cattle.

Estimates of the farm's prairie dog population vary from 30,00 to 60,000. Experts say they are concentrated on about 700 acres.

Mr. Cooke said seeing irrigation flow into prairie dog holes convinced him that they were a "potential" conduit for nitrate-laden sewage water to run into the water table. He recommended ordering prairie dog control.

In June, Mr. Cooke said, his agency issued the order without consulting wildlife experts or its groundwater experts. The agency's bottom line: resolve the prairie dog problem within a year.

Lubbock finally had an official ally in its effort to get rid of the prairie dogs. The city announced that it had to control or kill them all because of the state order.

Volunteer groups would have until winter to move them, but any left would be poisoned or blown up by spraying propane into burrows and igniting it.

State and wildlife agencies begged TCEQ to reconsider.

Logic and owls

Experts question how burrows could be blamed for funneling water when they go eight to 10 feet down, at most, while the groundwater is at 70 feet. Texas Parks and Wildlife analysis showed less than a third of the prairie dogs areas were sprayed with wastewater. A survey by a local Audubon Society leader and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service investigator indicates that few of the animals are where city monitoring has shown increases in groundwater nitrates.

Federal wildlife officials warned that killing prairie dogs would endanger burrowing owls, a federally protected species that nests in prairie dog burrows. City officials said waiting until winter would solve that, reasoning that the birds migrate and the few that remaining could be moved.

But a Texas Tech researcher noted that Lubbock County has North America's highest winter population of the owls. Wildlife experts say moving them in winter would be difficult, and some are sure to die.

Killing such migratory birds is a federal crime, and it would be impossible to ensure none were in the prairie dog burrows before injecting poisons and propane, federal scientists warned.

The owls are endangered in Canada, and Canadian wildlife officials wrote that their owl population would be threatened by such a large habitat loss in an area where they take shelter during annual winter migration.

In July, a U.S. Geological Survey wildlife biologist wrote the city that "the entire case for prairie dog eradication is built entirely upon speculation."

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offered grant money and experts to develop a plan to remove the few prairie dogs in Lubbock's irrigated areas. One of the agency's regional supervisors also suggested that the city should consider removing the cattle and planting native plants that "naturally reduce prairie dogs and increase nitrate uptake."

Lubbock Mayor Marc McDougal rejected that, writing one environmental group that the city didn't want money with strings attached or outsiders telling them how to manage the sewage farm.

State officials were similarly unmoved.

"In a meeting in my office, Pat Cooke said that the burden of proof is on other people," said Mr. Robertson of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. "He said you have to prove that I'm wrong." But he added there's no time to develop data to refute TCEQ.

Environmental groups say they probably have little recourse. No law protects the prairie dogs, and they say relocation efforts are stymied by city restrictions and a lack of places to move the animals. Only one rescuer has had access to the farm, and she says she has moved about 2,000 animals since July.

Others threatened

Wildlife officials say the result will be a slaughter of not only prairie dogs, but other species that depend on their burrows. "They're hellbent on killing all of them. There's no way to get around it," said Rob Lee, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enforcement officer in Lubbock. "I have kept asking them, 'Why are you so intent on this?' You're talking about killing everything: all the rabbits, all the badgers, all the reptiles. It's all going to be gone."

Mr. Cooke, the TCEQ inspector, concedes that killing them might not do anything. "The [pollution] problem may continue to exist. I hope not."

Mr. McDougal, the mayor, says the ultimate solution is spending $78 million to upgrade city sewage systems.

He notes that the city is reducing its reliance on the farm, which takes about 40 percent of the 20 million gallons of wastewater that Lubbock produces daily.

Regardless, he said, the prairie dogs must go.

"You have a number of the animal activists that don't like the direction that we're headed. But at the same, time the regulatory agency that tells us what to do is TCEQ. They have approved our plan," he said.

"Whether they're right and we're wrong or not, the bottom line is we have to listen to the regulatory agency."

E-mail lhancock@dallasnews.com

"This is a farm, f-a-r-m. Not a prairie dog town. In retrospect, we should've gone out and done what everybody else does: quietly go out there and get rid of them."

Dan Dennison, Lubbock environmental officer.

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A slightly shorter version of this story (due to space constraints) may be found at the Dallas Morning News website.

Updated 19 July 2006 .