Are Prairie Dogs Legal? The Federal Ban Ended in 2008

Are Prairie Dogs Legal? The Federal Ban Ended in 2008

Most exotic pet questions start with the states. This one starts with the federal government, because for five years there really was a national prairie dog ban, it really did stop the pet trade cold, and it is gone.

The 2003 Order and What Ended It

In the spring of 2003 the United States recorded its first monkeypox outbreak. The route was unusually well documented: a shipment of African rodents imported for the pet trade, housed alongside prairie dogs at an Illinois animal distributor, and sold on to people who had never left the country.

The response was fast. On June 11, 2003, the Director of the CDC and the Commissioner of Food and Drugs issued a joint order prohibiting, until further notice, the interstate transport, sale and commercial distribution of prairie dogs and six African rodent genera: tree squirrels, rope squirrels, dormice, Gambian giant pouched rats, brush-tailed porcupines and striped mice. That November it was replaced by an interim final rule splitting the job in two. The FDA took the domestic side at 21 CFR 1240.63. The CDC took imports at 42 CFR 71.56.

The domestic half is the one that mattered to pet owners, and the FDA removed it. Its final rule took effect September 8, 2008, and the summary is two sentences long:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is removing its regulation that established restrictions on the capture, transport, sale, barter, exchange, distribution, and release of African rodents, prairie dogs, and certain other animals. We are removing the restrictions because we believe they are no longer needed to prevent the further introduction, transmission, or spread of monkeypox, a communicable and potentially fatal disease, in the United States.

The CDC's import rule is still on the books, and it is worth knowing what it actually covers: you may not import rodents "obtained, directly or indirectly, from Africa, or whose native habitat is Africa." A prairie dog's native habitat is the Great Plains. That rule has never applied to it.

So as of today there is no federal restriction on owning, breeding, selling or transporting a prairie dog. Everything below is state law.

Where Prairie Dogs Actually Stand

Colorado Bans the Animal It Is Famous For

Of the fifteen bans, Colorado is the one that stops people.

The state's prohibited terrestrial wildlife rule reads:

Prairie dogs (Cynomys spp.) provided however that native prairie dogs may continue to be possessed pursuant to licenses or permits granted by the Division for scientific collection, relocation or rehabilitation purposes.

Two things are worth pulling out of that. First, this is a prohibition at genus level, not an omission from a list. Colorado can say no in two ways, and this is the stricter one. Second, the proviso is not a pet route. Scientific collection, relocation and rehabilitation are all institutional purposes, and the sentence exists to keep the state's own colony-relocation work lawful, not to let anyone keep one in a cage.

Black-tailed prairie dogs live in Colorado by the hundreds of thousands. You may watch them from a roadside in the eastern half of the state. You may not own one.

The States That Ban the Whole Order

Connecticut regulates rodents the opposite way round from everyone else, and it is the clearest drafting on this map. Rather than naming the rodents it bars, it puts the entire order Rodentia into Category Two and then excepts nine animals by name: the guinea pig, gerbil, chinchilla, rat, mouse, hamster, dwarf hamsters, the Patagonian mara and the American beaver.

Everything else in the order is caught, and the list of exceptions is a good map of what Connecticut thinks a pet rodent is. The Patagonian mara, a hare-sized caviomorph, made the cut. The prairie dog did not.

New York City reaches the same result with a different instrument. Its Health Code names "all large rodents (Rodentia)" and gives examples: gopher, muskrat, nutria, paca, woodchuck, marmot, beaver, prairie dog, capybara, sewellel, viscacha, porcupine, hutia. The clause turns on size rather than family, which is exactly why the hamster and the gerbil in the next cage over are fine.

Texas Says Yes, With a Number

Texas is the most useful entry for anyone comparing states, because it shows what a permissive answer looks like when a state has actually thought about the animal rather than forgotten it.

The black-tailed prairie dog is on the Texas nongame wildlife list. A person without a nongame permit may possess 25 or fewer of a species on that list, "provided the person does not engage in commercial activity involving the nongame wildlife." So: no permit, no fee, no application, a hard cap of 25, and you may not sell, offer for sale, exchange or barter a single one.

The cap follows captive-bred animals too. Texas defines nongame wildlife to include captive-bred nongame wildlife, so a receipt from a breeder does not lift it.

The Two That Have No Answer

Montana and Pennsylvania are recorded as unclear, and for opposite reasons.

Montana runs a white list for exotic wildlife, but "exotic wildlife" is defined as a species not native to Montana, and both the black-tailed and white-tailed prairie dog are natives. The white list therefore does not apply, and Montana's only prairie dog rules are a colony translocation program governing the movement of wild animals between wild sites. Nothing addresses a pet.

Pennsylvania names the prairie dog nowhere in its law. What arguably reaches it is a catch-all barring possession of wildlife captive bred in another state, read together with a statutory definition of wild animals that covers every mammal except horses, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. That is the same reading the Game Commission uses to treat hedgehogs and sugar gliders as prohibited, which makes it a live risk rather than an academic one, but it is an agency interpretation of a definition rather than a rule about this animal.

What This Adds Up To

A prairie dog is legal without conditions in nineteen jurisdictions, needs a permit in thirteen, is restricted in two, capped in one, unresolved in two, and flatly banned in fifteen. That makes it one of the most restricted small mammals we have mapped, and almost none of it is about danger. The bans are about disease history, about native-wildlife protection, and in Connecticut's and New York City's case about a drafting choice that swept up an entire taxonomic order.

The practical advice is the same as for any native rodent: check your own state's native-wildlife chapter, not just its exotic-pet list, because the exotic list is usually the wrong document. The flying squirrel legal guide walks through the same trap for a different native rodent, the capybara legal guide covers the animal that shares New York City's large-rodent clause, and the exotic pet legal hub explains how white list and black list states differ.

To see this at a glance, our interactive map of prairie dog laws shades every state and clicking one gives you the rule it comes from.

Sources & Further Reading