SERIOUSLY

Colorado Developer Bulldozes Over Live Prairie Dogs

Protesters pointed out prairie dogs looking in fear as construction vehicles tore through their colony.

A developer in Parker, Colorado has been excavating land--while a whole colony of prairie dogs is still living on it, protesters say.

“What we’re seeing now is an active destruction of a prairie dog colony,” Deanna Meyer, an activist with Prairie Protection Colorado, told KMGH. “Most developers would at least try to remove the prairie dogs from the land prior to commencing with development… This is a rare thing.”

More than 50 of the furry critters live on the excavation site, although some have already been killed, Meyer said. This week, she and other protesters have been trying to save the remaining ones by calling attention to the problem, standing alongside the site with signs reading “Wildlife Massacre” and “Kill Zone.”

One construction worker offered a sarcastic explanation of how he and his colleagues handled the creatures.

“See, what we did is, we put out mailers, and we put them in their holes, and we asked them all to leave, and they all moved out,” the worker can be seen telling Meyer in a video she posted to YouTube.

A more serious answer has not yet emerged, as the developer did not respond to a question from KMGH. The City of Parker, however, told the outlet there are no regulations for how to deal with prairie dogs on a construction site.

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Nathan Place

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