Prairie-Dog Shoot Draws Irate Fire From Protesters
NUCLA, Colo. - The old West met the new West yesterday in this dying mining town and confirmed what they suspected all along: They don't much like each other.
At this weekend's first Top Dog World Championship Prairie Dog Shoot, about 50 animal-rights supporters, mostly young people from Denver, Santa Fe and other cities, came face to face with 106 gun-toting ruralists who had come from as far away as North Carolina for a contest town leaders dreamed up to bolster the economy.
The object: to kill the most prairie dogs - a traditional nemesis to ranchers in the West, a cute and cuddly creature to many city folks.
The shooting got off to a slow start as overcast skies kept the animals, members of the squirrel family, deep in their burrows. But as the skies cleared, prairie dogs came out of their holes, striking their usual pose - standing erect on their hind legs - before bullets from high-powered rifles shattered them.
When the shooting ended, 1,162 had been killed and two protesters had been arrested on trespassing charges.
About 20 protesters - chanting, ``Save the Earth, let them live'' and ``It takes a big, tough man to shoot a little bitty prairie dog'' - marched outside the Moose Lodge in Nucla as the shooters fanned out over 80 square miles for the first of two days of competition.
To the protesters, the shooters were killing solely for the thrill of it - the prairie-dog carcasses were left to rot. ``They are a bunch of trigger-happy gun nuts who could end up wreaking havoc with the environment,'' said Robin Duxbury, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Humane Society in Denver.
Friday night, more than 100 local residents lined the main street in nearby Naturita to watch, and sometimes taunt, nine protesters.
``It's yuppies vs. rednecks,'' one of few neutral observers remarked. One local man joined the protesters, shouting his own slogan, ``Kill the damn prairie dogs, kill 'em real good.''
The idea for the prairie-dog shoot was born in February - mainly in the minds of Stan Austin, bank president, and Mike Mehew, president of the Ten Ring Gun Club, which is sponsoring the event. ``We were sitting around thinking of how to get some new dollars into our area,'' said Austin.
For almost 20 years, Nucla and Naturita had boomed, feeding the country's nuclear plants with uranium from their nearby hills until the bottom dropped out of the market around 1980. Today, buildings are boarded up along the main streets of both towns. The Uranium Drive-in is closed.
Austin and Mehew saw a way to give the towns a boost and, at the same time reduce the ranks of a varmint that rural Westerners have regularly shot, poisoned and gassed for more than a century.
The furor that arose from animal-rights activists, they said, was unexpected.
Outside interference - which five years ago dashed Nucla's hopes of opening a dump for low-level nuclear waste - only made backers more determined to hold the shoot.
Nucla Mayor John Vanderpool to Gov. Roy Romer and a U.S. representative who opposed the shoot: ``Buzz off.''
A man from Nucla, commenting on the need to breathe life back into the local economy: ``I don't care if it's a prairie-dog shoot or a yuppie shoot. We need it.''