EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — Prairie dogs will not be returning to the El Paso Zoo.
A mystery solved at the zoo in November of last year revealed that two separate colonies of the animals were killed by a rare bacterial infection and tunnel collapse, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
KTSM first learned of that report thanks to Borderzine, the news magazine from the University of Texas at El Paso.
In November of 2023, the zoo fully excavated the prairie dog exhibit after a second colony of a dozen of the animals disappeared shortly after being introduced a few months earlier in August.
With those efforts, they were able to find all but three of the animals dead. The surviving three were in poor condition, and one of them died shortly-after, according to the report.
The remains of a colony of 14 prairie dogs that had disappeared in 2021, were also discovered. A report by the USDA in 2023, concluded that 14 animals were likely taken by predators.
“We never quite agreed with it at the zoo because there aren’t many predators like hawks that could take a prairie dog because they’re pretty big animals and it would have to be repeated like a dozen times or so and then they go underground pretty quick,” said the director of the El Paso Zoo, Joe Montisano.
Montisano said that they had excavated the perimeter of the exhibit when the first colony of the animals went missing, but that they found no breaks in the underground perimeter or any indication that the animals might have dug out.
The zoo spent nearly a year putting up netting atop the exhibit to deter predators and comply with the USDA guidelines.
Before fully excavating the exhibit last November, the zoo first installed motion-activated cameras in the exhibit and used a pipe camera to explore the tunnels underneath to see if they could detect any activity from the animals.
Those efforts rendered no success, and a report from the USDA in December of 2023, contended that the zoo was slow in their efforts to locate the animals.
“More animals might have been found alive if the facility did not delay more intensive measures to actually locate and observe them,” the report read.
But Montisano explained that they had to be cautious about excavating.
“We certainly did everything we could in our power there to do some things. When you deal with wild animals, there are just some unknowns that we can’t control sometimes. And unfortunately, that was at the demise of the prairie dogs this time. But there’s nothing else we could have done, or we couldn’t have dug faster, harder, brought in more machinery,” said Montisano.
Montisano said that another point of contention the zoo has had with USDA is that they were demanding that they monitor the prairie dogs daily, but he explained that it is impossible.
“Look, they’re saying that we need to see these animals every day, and that’s not possible with underground animals. ‘So what would you like? How could we accomplish that? Or are you saying USDA, that you’re outlawing prairie dogs?’ It’s across the country, basically, because there’s no way to physically see these animals every day. They live underground in their own tunnels and burrows,” said Montisano.
The zoo does not have any desire to bring back prairie dogs, according to Montisano.
The exhibit will instead be redesigned and is likely to feature native Chihuahuan-Desert birds.
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