In the summer of 2005, Larry Haverfield, a cattle rancher in western Kansas who had spent decades raising livestock near Russell Springs, received a letter from Logan County ordering him to eliminate the prairie dog colonies on his land within 15 days. When the deadline passed, the county said it would send applicators to do the job and bill him for it. Haverfield refused.
The dispute over prairie dogs on his ranch became a legal and political fight that lasted several years. It ended with a federal court ruling that prevented the county from poisoning the animals, and it eventually led to the reintroduction of the black-footed ferret, the rarest mammal in North America, on Haverfield’s land. The story involves a state extermination law from 1901, a lawsuit against the county, and a species that had not been seen in Kansas since 1957.
The black-tailed prairie dog is a ground squirrel named for its barking call, which the Lewis and Clark expedition noted. The animals live in large underground colonies. At the turn of the 20th century, they were extremely numerous. In 1901, a government naturalist estimated that a single prairie dog town in Texas covered roughly 25,000 square miles and held about 400 million animals. By the early 2000s, black-tailed prairie dogs had been eliminated from more than 95 percent of their historical range due to organized poisoning campaigns.
Ecologists describe the prairie dog as a keystone species, meaning its presence supports many other animals. According to wildlife journalist Ted Williams, prairie dog towns provide food, shelter, or habitat for at least 150 vertebrate species, and about 30 of them cannot survive without prairie dogs. Burrowing owls nest in their tunnels, hawks hunt over their colonies, and swift foxes den in their diggings.
The black-footed ferret depends almost entirely on prairie dogs, relying on them for more than 90 percent of its diet and living in their burrows. As prairie dog populations collapsed, ferret populations collapsed with them. By 1979, the species was declared extinct. In 1981, a dog on a ranch near Meeteetse, Wyoming, brought home a dead black-footed ferret, revealing the last known wild population. Disease soon spread through that colony, and biologists captured the survivors, leaving 18 animals. Every black-footed ferret alive today descends from just seven of those founders.
In Kansas, the last authenticated sighting of a black-footed ferret was on December 31, 1957, in Logan County. After that, they were gone from the state.
Haverfield was not an activist who bought a ranch. He was born in Scott City, Kansas, in 1936 and married Beth in 1954. He ran cattle his entire life. Over decades of rotational grazing, he formed the view that prairie dogs were part of the local ecosystem. He believed their grazing made grass more nutritious and that their burrows aerated the soil and helped rainwater soak in. Asked whether the animals hurt his cattle, he said no, and that his cattle were healthier with prairie dogs present.
His neighbors held a different view. Prairie dog colonies reduce available forage for cattle, and the animals can expand onto adjacent property. A 2006 study in Colorado found that colonies covering 20 percent of a pasture cut steer weight gains by about 5 percent, and colonies covering 60 percent cut gains by 13 percent. Other researchers argued that cattle compensate for lower forage quantity with higher forage quality on prairie dog colonies. The debate continues.
In Logan County, several neighbors saw prairie dogs as a threat to their livelihoods. One neighbor, Jill Hansen, said the animals should be called prairie rats and that they threatened ranch incomes. County commission chairman Carl Urich compared prairie dogs to termites in a house, saying the question was whether to kill part of them or clean them all out. Urich reportedly wore a cap advertising Rozol, the poison used against prairie dogs, when wildlife advocates were present.
The county applied Rozol to the Haverfield and Barnhart properties anyway. Rozol is an anticoagulant, and animals that consume it bleed internally for one to three weeks. Scavengers such as hawks, eagles, and foxes can be exposed to the poison by feeding on dying prairie dogs. The law required the bait to be placed inside burrows, but according to Ted Williams, the applicator on Haverfield’s land spread it on the surface, and the state fined the operation $2,800 for the violation. Haverfield later found a golden eagle dead in the grass on the Barnhart property, likely killed by Rozol.
Thirteen neighbors sued Haverfield over his prairie dogs, and the court dismissed the case. The county commission passed a resolution banning endangered species from Logan County. At one public meeting, the local paper counted the room at 99 people against Haverfield, with Haverfield as the sole dissenter. By his own account, he was proud of that.
In response to the county’s actions, Haverfield and his neighbors Gordon and Martha Barnhart took a different approach. They invited the federal government to use their combined land, roughly 10,000 acres, as a reintroduction site for the black-footed ferret. Ron Klataske of the Audubon of Kansas, a member of the national ferret recovery team, inspected the prairie dog colonies and concluded they could support the species.
That decision changed the legal situation. Once an endangered species depends on those prairie dogs, exterminating them becomes a violation of the Endangered Species Act, which prohibits taking a federally protected animal, including destroying its habitat. The lawsuit, Barnhart and Haverfield versus the Board of County Commissioners of Logan County, went through several courts. Senior Judge Jack Lively ruled in favor of the ranchers, permanently preventing Logan County from eradicating prairie dogs on the property. The county appealed and lost. The Kansas Court of Appeals affirmed that the Endangered Species Act preempts the 1901 state statute.
The outcome contained an irony. The neighbors said they were defending property rights against federal overreach, but the law they relied on allowed the government to enter private land, poison it, and bill the owner. Haverfield, who sided with Washington, defended a landowner’s right to decide what lives on his own property.
The first black-footed ferrets were released in Logan County on December 18, 2007. Twenty-four ferrets were set free across two sites. More releases followed, with 74 ferrets released onto Haverfield’s land by 2011. Wild-born kits were documented in subsequent years. With the prairie dog colonies protected, other species returned to the area on their own, including burrowing owls, ferruginous hawks, and swift foxes. Defenders of Wildlife later described the area as possibly the most wildlife-abundant spot in western Kansas, while it continued to operate as a working cattle ranch.
The greatest long-term threat to the prairie dogs and ferrets was not the county or ranchers, but sylvatic plague, the same bacterium that causes bubonic plague. It arrived in San Francisco around 1900 and has spread across the West. Prairie dogs have no evolved defense, and an outbreak can kill more than 90 percent of a colony. The disease also kills ferrets. In 2008, plague hit Conata Basin in South Dakota, the most successful ferret site in the country, and reduced its ferret population from roughly 300 to as few as 49.
The Kansas reintroduction site was selected partly because it was free of plague. Maintaining that status requires ongoing work, including insecticide dust against fleas, an oral vaccine for prairie dogs baited with peanut butter, and vaccinations for the ferrets.
Larry Haverfield died in 2014 at age 77. He lived to see wild-born ferrets on his land. His son, Calvin, continued the work until his own death in 2023. The third generation of the family now runs the ranch.
In 2025, a survey team captured 11 ferrets on the 10,000-acre complex, eight of them born in the wild, with 43 sightings logged. The species remains endangered, with a few hundred individuals in the wild across 30 reintroduction sites. In 2020, scientists cloned a ferret named Elizabeth Ann from tissue frozen in 1988. In 2024, a second clone, Antonia, gave birth to healthy kits, marking the first time a cloned endangered animal in the United States has reproduced. The genetic line from an animal frozen three decades ago is now back in the breeding population.
Russell Springs looks much as it did when the story began. Nothing marks the site where a state extermination law was halted or where the continent’s rarest mammal now hunts at night. Haverfield stood alone in a room counted at 99 to one against him and did not change his position. His neighbors were not unreasonable in their concerns, and their fears were genuine. The story leaves a question about how a person knows whether they are the only one who sees something clearly or merely the stubborn outlier in a room full of agreement. There is no simple answer.
