A Stitch in Haste

Not a good time to be a prairie dog in South Dakota:

Wildlife workers have begun a program to poison thousands of prairie dogs in the grasslands of South Dakota to stop them from moving onto private ranch land parched by drought, a federal official said on Tuesday.
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"We need to be good neighbors and we do not want a landowner to go out of business," [a supervisor at Buffalo Gap National Grassland] said, referring to ranchers who said prairie dogs were eating the little grass left in the fifth year of drought.
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[Conservation] groups had sued in federal court in Denver, saying the prairie dogs should not be shot on federal land especially because their habitat is home to the endangered black-footed ferret whose diet consists mainly of prairie dogs.
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"We hate that wildlife will be killed and ferret habitat destroyed on our public land, but the settlement will save more wildlife and habitat in the long run," he said.

Famous last words. Whenever someone says a benefit accrues "in the long run," take a very long run away.



"Predator-Prey" or "Environmentalist Coalition"?

Leaving aside the whole question of wiping out prairie dogs per se (i.e., from an animal lover perspective) or the politics of endangered species, or whether we should have public parks at all, or why a multi-year drought doesn't qualify South Dakota as a disaster area so it can get FEMA money, or whether we should even have FEMA...

Whoa, getting dizzy...

Anyway, why exactly should the federal government be subsidizing the protection of private ranchers? Why can't the ranchers pay for their own prairie dog extermination? Folks here in Manhattan have to buy their own Raid and mousetraps, so why don't South Dakotans have to buy their own "Dog-be-Gone" or whatever?

Show me an externality and I'll show you a government intervention I can probably live with. But I'm coming up blank here.

(Cross-linked at Outside the Beltway.)