Prairie dog move denied

Chaves County doesn’t want prairie dogs, and the Clovis City Commission declined on Thursday night to help a citizens group bring them there. By a unanimous vote, the commission denied a request by Citizens for Prairie Dogs to capture prairie dogs from the Clovis Civic Center, O.G. Potter Park and the Goodwin Lake Walking Trails and move them to Bureau of Land Management property in Chaves County. “We just want to save the prairie dogs, remove them, relocate them humanely,” said Susan Hubby of Citizens for Prairie Dogs. Not many others at the meeting were interested. Jack Muse of Clovis, in sentiments echoed by other citizens, said the city should look into an ordinance that declares the animal a public nuisance and require property owners eradicate them. Johnny Chavez said he was dismayed by accounts of prairie dogs being found in city pools and holes in youth baseball practice fields. “We don’t need them; nobody else wants them,” Chavez said. Regarding the land where the prairie dogs would be kept, Joe Adair of Bold Visions said the land was controlled by the BLM, and any desire they have for the land supersedes a recent ordinance by the Chaves County Commission outlawing the importation of prairie dogs into the county from another entity. Adair said that prairie dogs would take centuries to get from that BLM land to private ranch land, but that wasn’t enough to convince Chaves County Commissioner James Duffy, who came to Clovis for the meeting. “We spend thousands and thousands of dollars to eradicate prairie dogs,” Duffy said. “They are rodents.” He noted the Curry County Commission had a similar ordinance in the works and said, with no intent of being flippant, if prairie dogs aren’t good enough for Curry County they certainly shouldn’t be good enough for Chaves County...more