by Richard "Bugman" Fagerlund
Daily Lobo Columnist
Once again, prairie dogs are getting the short end of the stick. Now they are being blamed for spreading monkey pox in the Midwest.
The good news is that the federal government halted the sale of prairie dogs by the exotic pet trade. The government rarely does anything right and this is refreshing. Hopefully it will make this a permanent injunction.
Prairie dogs do not make good pets. They are social animals who are only happy when living in a community with other prairie dogs. They are not bred in captivity for sale to the pubic. They are caught in the wild, often by being violently separated from their close knit families for the purpose of being sold by miserable people who do not care about anything except how much money they can make, regardless of how much they hurt something.
Although prairie dogs may be spreading monkey pox, it did not originate from them. They caught it from a Gambian giant rat in a pet-trading warehouse.
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The government also put a ban on importing African rodents for sale in the United States. This is good, but it doesn't go far enough. It should prohibit the sale of any wild animal for sale as pets from any country.
Right now the policy is to wait until a disease is discovered and then react. They should be more proactive and keep all animals from being imported for pets before a disease is unleashed on the public and not wait until people get sick and die. We are fortunate that monkey pox is not a seriously fatal disease, the next time we may not be so lucky.
Keeping diseases out of the country is one reason to ban the importation of wild animals for pets. We are pretty strict about the importation of birds for that very reason, keeping exotic diseases away from our domestic poultry and companion birds. We need to extend that concern to imported reptiles, mammals and even arthropods.
We don't need to keep Gambian giant rats, prairie dogs, giant scorpions, tarantulas, pythons and God knows what else in our living rooms. They belong in their own habitat where they can thrive and be happy. I can remember when gerbils and hamsters were considered exotic animals. Now you haven't lived unless you have some sort of weird rat or snake in a cage in your house. I have no problem keeping wild animals if you are rehabilitating or engaging them in some kind of research involving conservation.
However, there are people who keep snakes in captivity so they can breed them and cross breed them to see what kind of new color combinations they can come up with. They seem to think snakes are like orchids or roses. Usually what they get are foul-tempered mutants that would be unable to live in the wild. I am not a fan of big government, but I do see a need to protect our most important natural resource, our animals, from people who have way too much time on their hands by keeping animals in captivity that belong in their natural habitat.
The exotic pet trade is every bit as evil as the cockfighting crowd and both are a cancer in our society. Cockfighters torture chickens for fun and profit. The pet trade sells animals that few people know how to properly care for and which eventually die, escape or contaminate our domestic species, all for fun and profit. We have thousands upon thousands of homeless cats and dogs who would benefit from a loving home, yet we are importing rats and capturing prairie dogs to fill that niche.
If you want a cat or a dog, you have to go to the pound or an animal shelter to get one. When you go to a pet shop, all you will find are imported animals that have no business being in cages.
I doubt if the exotic pet trade will be going out of business anytime soon, but I do suggest we contact our congressional representative and ask them to pass strict importation laws regarding these animals. Mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians should be as stringently regulated as exotic birds are. That should be minimal. Ideally, exotic animals would be totally prohibited from being kept as pets, but that won't happen anytime soon as that would take courageous political leadership, which is an oxymoron.
Meanwhile, prairie dogs are being blamed for the spread of monkey pox. I can envision truckloads of beer drinking rednecks with rifles driving out to the mesa to protect society from monkey pox by shooting all the prairie dogs.
I can also envision the base commander at Kirtland AFB, who apparently is afraid of prairie dogs, breaking out the napalm to protect the military from this scourge. Someone wrote and told me that if animals were in charge of the planet instead of people, they would treat us a helluva lot better than we treat them. There is no doubt about that.
