NPR did a piece today about prairie dogs. It seems the little critters have gotten out of hand, population wise. One farmer claimed to have lost upwards of $60,000, due to their feeding habits (some damn expensive grass, I’d say). The report said there are close to a billion prairie dogs just in southwestern South Dakota.

Legislation enacted to regulate this explosion is being met with intense opposition by the wildlife organizations. Their argument, instead of focusing on just the prairie dogs which are not an endangered species, looks at the black-tailed ferret. Only about 500 of these exist in the world, all in southwestern South Dakota. They claim these ferrets’ diets consist mainly of prairie dogs. Without the dogs, the ferrets would starve.

Last year, millions of prairie dogs were poisoned, but it seems to have barely made a dent in their population, or the problem. People are screaming at the government to do something, and the wildlife people are screaming right back.

All this bickering and politics aside, it starts me thinking about hierarchies and the food chain. If mankind so chose, we could eliminate the prairie dog population completely. Look at what we’ve done to smallpox and polio. Both are virtually non-existent. Humans can eradicate most threats to our species, be they life or merely economic threats.

How do we have the power to decide the fate of the prairie dog, smallpox, or the spotted owl, when the worst they can now do is eat our grass (and maybe a finger if we get too close)? We are intelligent. We know this, because we can look at the prairie dog and assess his threat. Can he do the same to us? Does he even know human beings exist? Would he know we were there, even if we stood over him?

My point is this: We deem ourselves Earth’s caretakers. We do this because we perceive no intelligent life forms higher than our own. If we see a surplus or a deficit, we seek to remedy that. If a species threatens our survival or way of life, we regulate it, until the threat disappears.

So, what is it that we threaten? As far as we know, the population of this planet is larger than it’s ever been. Yet, in the most populated regions, we see the most suffering. AIDS and war, both caused mainly from ignorance, threaten to wipe us out. Hmm, is there a relationship here, I wonder? Intelligence gives us power over the prairie dogs, while ignorance destroys us.

What if there exists an intelligence greater than our own? What if this intelligence determines that our population threatens something of value to it or them? Are AIDS and war the poison of the higher intelligence?

To those who would say that such maladies are simply natural or acts of God, I’d say that’s a cop out, and that human beings may be called “natural” or “acts of God,” at least as far as prairie dogs are concerned. Perhaps aspects of nature or God would be a more proper description.

I’m not necessarily advocating UFO’s, aliens, or the like (nor do I discount these). But, if I were to observe a colony of ants building one of their monumental structures, I wonder how many would notice my presence, much less perceive my ability to flatten their weeks of work in less than a second. Not many, if any, I would think.