Gay Balfour, owner of Cortez’s Dog Gone Prairie Dog Control, has worked with eradicating the animals from the area for 23 years. Over that time, he has seen plague wipe out entire populations of the large rodent. However, he thinks the few that survive an outbreak may have a genetic immunity to the disease and offer hope to humans in the form of a vaccine./ Photo by Steve Eginoire

Unlocking the mystery of plague

Varmint relocator thinks keystone species may hold key to disease

by Paul Ferrell

Not only is Feb. 2 Ground Hog’s Day, it is also a holiday for the ground hog’s western cousin, the prairie dog. Although Prairie Dog Day is not as well known, Cortez resident Gay Balfour thinks it should be.  The 72-year old Balfour truly appreciates prairie dogs; he has worked with them for 23 years. But he is much more than just a prairie dog expert, he’s a dreamer. He dreams of traveling to distant stars and overcoming all human diseases – with prairie dogs. 

Balfour’s Cortez-based business, Dog Gone Prairie Dog Control, began as a vivid dream. One night he dreamt of vacuuming prairie dogs out of deep burrows with a bright green hose. The following day, he was offered for sale a specialized piece of equipment used for vacuuming out sewer lines. It was essentially a powerful, truck-mounted, vacuum cleaner. He borrowed the truck to test it out, but it lacked a hose that would fit into prairie dog burrows. After a brief search, he found the perfect hose – it was bright green. 

He tested the vacuum on a local prairie dog town and it worked. He bought the truck, and his prairie dog vacuuming business quickly became a success. Balfour primarily uses the vacuum method for his work, but in some cases, his duel-wheeled 23,000 pound vacuum truck is not practical. “If I was doing a cemetery or a baseball field or something like that, I couldn’t put a big heavy truck on it,” he said.

In those cases, he uses his much smaller foam machine. With the right mixture of soap and water, he creates a foam of the proper consistency that is pumped down into the burrows. Instinctively the animals flee. When the stunned, bleary-eyed creatures emerge from their burrows, they are captured by hand – almost all alive. His motto, painted on the back of his truck: “Bring ’em back alive.”

Balfour says live capture traps are not efficient and he would never use leg hold traps, poison bait or poison gas, which he says is the worst method. “Everything down hole dies, all the crickets and the beetles, and the bugs, all the tiger salamanders, the mice, everything else that’s down that hole dies,4 along with the prairie dogs,” he says. With his vacuum truck, he captures the prairie dogs and releases all the other animals, “You can just take out the prairie dogs and dump everything out on the ground and they can go back to the earth.”  

Most prairie dogs are captured live, but not all. In cases where he cannot use his vacuum truck or foam machine, he uses a rifle. Balfour is a gunsmith and a marksman, and he takes special care with shooting prairie dogs. “You have to do it precisely and you should do it responsibly. You should do it with-lead free ammo, so your predator birds aren’t affected by it. And use high-velocity, fragmentary bullets, so they won’t ricochet.”

Balfour recalls spending a day shooting prairie dogs around dairy cows and gas wells with no fatalities – other than prairie dogs.  

Balfour has shot thousands of prairie dogs but he has captured many more – about 120,000 be his estimates. So where do his furry prisoners go? “I developed a system of delivering them to the black footed ferret recovery program. I took prairie dogs by the tens of thousands right to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”

The endangered black footed ferret hunts prairie dogs almost exclusively.  It was brought back from the edge of extinction thanks to the recovery program. “When they started, they had 28 animals and they’ve probably got over 5,000 now.” He proudly adds, “I’m the guy that helped them recover.”

His prairie dogs are used to train captive-bred ferrets to survive in the wild. First the prairie dogs are quarantined, to be certain they are disease free, then they’re released into a 20-acre control cage for the ferrets to hunt. Ferrets that show a real talent for hunting are released into the wild, while the less adept are kept for the breeding program.

The quarantine period is vital because prairie dogs are highly susceptible to bubonic plague.  Balfour has seen the plague wipe out hundreds of prairie dogs before he could deliver them to the Fish and Wildlife Service, but occasionally one or two will survive. He is intrigued by the survivors and has been investigating the phenomena for the last eight years.  He sought out experts from the CDC and the FDA and some agree with his thesis that less than 1 percent of prairie dogs have a genetic immunity to bubonic plague.

Balfour realized that a genetic immunity to bubonic plague can mean immunity to all diseases since bubonic plague is a bacterial disease.  “I believe that if you identify that genetic code, clone it, make a vaccine out of it, you can get a shot and a person would never, ever, ever be sick of anything – for their entire life. Prairie dogs are the key.”

For the last eight years, Balfour has been keeping prairie dogs that have been exposed to plague in hopes that he can get them to a researcher. He says he does not fear working around the plague-infected animals. “I’m gutsy, I don’t let anybody else around when I’m doing it and I monitor myself.  I’m cautious the way I handle them.”

Balfour has been frustrated by the apparent lack of interest by the scientific community to his idea of a vaccine. In addition to several federal and state agencies, he has taken his idea to pharmaceutical companies and universities, but it seems that no one will listen. “It’s like you just hit a stone wall,” he says. Only a few scientists have accepted his invitation to visited. “When I tell them I’ve got hot plague, nobody wants to come see me.”

He considered working independently on his project. Currently he has only three prairie dogs with immunity to the plague and, because the animals have short lifespans, he’s always looking for more.  “If I had the money and the wherewithal right now, I would buy 1-square-mile around me and I’d have all the genetic material I needed to cure the human race of just about everything.”

Balfour is primarily interested in the development of a vaccine but he sees other benefits coming from the study of prairie dogs, such as emulating their ability to hibernate. “I tried to get NASA to do long-term sleep studies for prairie dogs. I thought if we could identify that genome pattern you might be able to make a pill or vaccine for long-flight astronauts to where they could take a snooze and not age in flight.”

Balfour realizes that some may think of him as a dreamer, but he sees dreams as an asset – not a liability. He vows to continue pursuing his dreams, “I’m not a quitter.”