What Two Percent Are Saying
"Prairie dogs have one of the largest vocabularies in the animal kingdom, with more sophisticated language skills than whales, dolphins, or parrots. Prairie dogs have a call for human and can add syllables to that call to say tall, thin human in a blue shirt and short, fat human in a yellow shirt. A prairie dog in Utah can invent a new call for something she has never seen before, and a prairie dog in Colorado will understand what that call means the first time he hears it. And yet prairie dogs are killed in shooting competitions, to make way for development, and by law in some states. With only two percent of the historic population of prairie dogs remaining, time is running out to hear what they have to tell us."