October 28, 2002 5:22 AM

File this under "Only In Texas"

Prairie dogs dig a deeper chasm: Protests heat up over Lubbock mayor's extermination plan

If you think there's not much going on in west Texas, you wouldn't be far off. I offer this story as subjective proof:

LUBBOCK -- Just when the dust appeared to have settled over the last prairie dog hole, the guerrilla warfare started.

Twice in the past three weeks, signs and markers have appeared at the 6,000-acre site where treated sewage is sprayed, decrying the city's on-off and on-again plan to kill the thousands of prairie dogs that live there.

"In Lubbock `Control' Means Kill" was the message on one sign, which was accompanied by scores of little white crosses driven into the earth.

The signs are the latest development in a continuing face-off between Lubbock Mayor Marc McDougal and animal rights activists.

"Things like that, those signs, just serve to make me more determined to get rid of prairie dogs," said McDougal.

And McDougal's determination only serves to make the activists more active.

The controversy began in June, when the then-Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission cited the city of Lubbock for polluting the site with treated sewage the city sprays on crops.

The TNRCC, now titled the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, reported high concentrations of nitrates in monitoring wells in the area, indicating the sewage has permeated the soil and threatens the Ogallala Aquifer below.

That report -- in a town where "Prairie Dog Pete" was once touted as Lubbock's ambassador to the world, where "Peppy the Prairie Dog" was previously used by the TNRCC itself to promote recycling -- at once made the little animal a villain and a cause célèbre.

Some cities worry about their crime rate, some worry about traffic congestion. Lubbock, well, if prairie dogs are as bad as it gets, life out there must be pretty good.

Much of Lubbock's problems can be laid to it's inability to do what other cities would have quietly gone ahead and done: eliminate the little critters.

"This is a farm, f-a-r-m. Not a prairie dog town," Lubbock's environmental officer Dan Dennison told the Dallas Morning News. "We should've gone out and done what everybody else does: quietly go out there and get rid of them."

Don't you just hate it when those #&**@^% environmentalists stick their noses into things? ;o)

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on October 28, 2002 5:22 AM.

Peace, order, and Anna Nicole Smith was the previous entry in this blog.

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