From 
Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUponPrairie Dogs Beware
Judy Balfour woke up one morning in 1991 to find her husband, Gay, ranting about a crazy dream he'd had."What are you talking about?" Judy asked, her voice sleepy."I'm going to catch prairie dogs with a giant vacuum!" he announced.
Let's back up. After years of successfully navigating the business world, Gay lost just about everything on a marina deal that sank. Reduced to bagging groceries for a living, he pulled a George Bailey and prayed for a miracle. His "Clarence" came in the form of the dream that made Judy Balfour question her husband's sanity.
Cut to...2005. Gay, now 64, and a successful businessman once again, laughs at his wife's dumbfounded reaction. "I guess she thought I snapped my guitar string or something."
Maybe, but Gay insists that his dream is how his prairie dog extraction business, Dog Gone, got started.
Ask people out West and they'll tell you the ubiquitous prairie dogs are a nuisance. They and their burrows have wrecked farms, ranches, even airports. "I've seen [ranchers] close up shop and give it to 'em," says Gay.
That's his cue. He drives a retrofitted sanitation department vacuum truck to a "prairie dog town," where he shoves a hose down a burrow. A powerful blower kicks in, sucking up the prairie dog through the 30-foot-long tube at speeds that can reach 40 mph. The creature's trip ends inside a large, padded box at the back of the truck. Usually more confused than anything, the dogs are turned over to the government as part of a program to save black-footed ferrets, America's most endangered mammal. Prairie dogs are their favorite dish and a key to their survival.
Gay owes a lot to the prairie dog, and he knows it. He tends to the sick and wounded animals even though he's about to feed them to the ferrets.
"It's stewardship," he says.
Let's face it, when animals aren't being picture-postcard cute, they're usually doing something to annoy us. You may not have a prairie dog problem, but around two-thirds of all households had run-ins with wildlife in the past year, according to Dr. Mike Conover of the Jack H. Berryman Institute at Utah State University. They resulted in over $5 billion in damages. Those numbers plus the fear factor of sharing a home with a wild beast and it's no wonder that some 10,000 people make a nice living escorting animals off our property. We took a look around and found all sorts of animal removers removing all sorts of animals.
Advertisement 
Your Comments
See all
...
Post your commentCancel