Big Media Hoogland
By I meant to link to this last week, but life intervened. Anyhow, my crazy (in a good way) Uncle John was recently profiled in the WaPo, where his life’s work — the study of prairie dog behavior — was described in all its gruesome glory:
The world’s expert on lust, violence and cannibalism among prairie dogs uses a slide in his lectures that sums up a lifetime of research. A pack of the squirrel-size creatures is shown perched on their hind legs: cute, cute, cute, cute, cute.
But then, next to each fuzzy head, John L. Hoogland has written something nasty he has seen happen in a prairie dog “town.” “Promiscuity, kidnapping, pedophilia, murder, infanticide,” it says. Not so cute.
“Studying prairie dogs is like watching little people,” he says. “Whatever we do, they do as well, and usually more often.”
John’s work has pretty thoroughly undermined the claims of idiotic Western ranchers, who insist on waging a war of extermination against prairie dogs because the holes they burrow allegedly break cows’ legs. John’s never met a rancher who’s actually experienced this with his cows — it’s always a friend of a friend, or some guy the rancher heard about in the adjacent county. As the Post article explains, prairie dogs keep their populations pretty stable, in part by periodically tearing each other limb from limb, and so they pose a substantially lesser threat to cattle than rabbits or other fecund critters that aren’t quite so nasty to each other.
The whole thing is pretty interesting.