The article was a paean to the prairie dog, a member of the rodent family (the same family as mice, rats and similar vermin) that has invaded our city, burrowing holes that people occasionally fall into (resulting in broken arms and legs), turning our municipal golf course into a huge billiard table, and making hazard courses out of our walking trails.

WildEarth Guardians claims that our prairie dogs are at the verge of extinction, which comes as a huge surprise since they are everywhere and expanding rapidly into every nook and cranny of the city. To compare them to the whooping crane and condors, as Rosmarino does, is an incredible stretch.

Our nation's founders fought the Revolutionary War to preserve property rights, and made a big point of the principle in the Constitution. But evidently prairie dogs trump the Constitution, because they can take a piece of valuable property (into which some might have poured their life savings) and make it worthless overnight, merely by establishing a colony on it and then calling on their allies in Santa Fe and the federal government to rule that the land is theirs and any attempt to remove them will result in a heavy fine or a jail sentence.

What the British couldn't do, prairie dogs are doing with ease.

People like Rosmarino ignore the fact that prairie dogs carry diseases that can be (and have been) transmitted to human beings. Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control bans prairie dogs as pets because the center knows they harbor the bubonic plague and tularemia that have been carried by fleas and ticks from animals to humans.

Don't 10 to 15 people contract bubonic plague in the United States each year (many of them in the American Southwest), and doesn't one out of seven die from it? Haven't human beings contracted the disease in counties that border Iron County? And haven't prairie dogs also been known to occasionally carry the monkey pox and, on several occasions, transfer that disease to humans?

An entire colony of prairie dogs here in Iron County suddenly expired last year, and many suspect it was bubonic plague, but was the public informed about it? The Web site for the Centers for Disease Control recommends that if plague has recently been found in an area, observations of sick and dead animals should be reported to the local health department or law enforcement officials.

But when officials discovered the collapse of the Wild Pea Hollow prairie dog colony, no one notified Cedar City's police department, nor was the general public alerted. Indeed, to this date there has been no announcement as to what happened to the colony. Perhaps this is news someone doesn't want the public to know about.

The CDC Web site recommends that sources of food and nesting places for rodents around homes, work places and recreation areas be removed. But Rosmarino thinks it is fine to let prairie dogs take over the city's golf course (a recreation area), a place where there were never prairie dogs before the golf course was built.

Should the city abandon its golf course to the prairie dogs and go build another (which will also ultimately be infested by prairie dogs)? To carry the argument to its ultimate conclusion, Cedar City should be abandoned so prairie dogs can flourish. The absurdity of the position of WildEarth Guardians becomes increasingly evident.

There are, of course, hundreds of thousands of prairie dogs scattered across the United States, and most of them are not on the threatened or endangered list. The difference between the Utah prairie dog and those of the plains is that it has a white tip on its tail, is smaller and likes to hibernate more than the prairie dogs of other areas. So having a white tail makes it a separate species that must be preserved in and of itself?

Rosmarino wants the transfer of prairie dogs from Cedar City's golf course to stop because in the process 90 percent of those that are transferred will die. What she doesn't mention is that the remaining 10 percent live on to establish colonies that eventually will produce many, many more prairie dogs than the ones that died during the move.

It seems to me that if the federal government declares a species endangered or threatened, it should spend whatever efforts are needed to get a truly accurate count and should also provide the money and resources to protect them, not foist the burden on the people with the singular misfortune of having the rodents living in their backyard.

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* GERALD R. SHERRATT is mayor of Cedar City.