In the open grasslands of South Dakota, not far from the dramatic rock formations of Badlands National Park, lives one of the continent’s cutest, fiercest, and rarest animals: the black-footed ferret.
Black-footed ferrets, weasel-like animals with distinctive dark bands around their eyes and black feet, are ruthless little hunters. At night, they dive into burrows in pursuit of juicy prairie dogs, their primary food source. Without prairie dogs, these ferrets would not survive.
From as many as a million ferrets in the 19th century, today there are only a few hundred of these furry predators roaming the Great Plains, the only place on Earth they live. That there are any black-footed ferrets at all is something of a miracle. In the 1970s, scientists thought black-footed ferrets were extinct, but a twist of fate, and an unprecedented breeding effort led by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, brought this critical piece of the prairie ecosystem back from the brink.
This success — one of the greatest of any wildlife revival program — is now at risk.
Earlier this month, as part of the Trump administration’s purge of federal employees, Tina Jackson, the head of the FWS’s entire black-footed ferret recovery program, was fired. FWS also fired two other permanent staffers who were involved in keeping captive ferrets alive at the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center, the nation’s main breeding facility. Those cuts amount to more than a quarter of the center’s permanent, non-administrative staff, Jackson said. The center also has a vacant biologist position that Jackson said may not be filled.
The staff changes imperil the tenuous success of ferret recovery and the very existence of these animals, several experts including current and former Fish and Wildlife Service employees told Vox. Critical funding has been restricted, too: Two organizations that rely on federal money for ferret conservation on public and tribal lands told Vox that funds for this work were frozen.
Experts who have spent decades trying to save black-footed ferrets say these impacts threaten the broader prairie ecosystem. Efforts to conserve ferrets and their prey sustain this important American landscape, a home for insects that pollinate our crops, plants that store carbon in their long roots, and streams that provide us with fresh water.
“Right now, the recovery of the species is dependent on captive populations,” said Jackson, who started her role with the Fish and Wildlife Service last spring, after more than two decades with Colorado’s state wildlife agency. “Without people to take care of those captive populations, we will potentially lose the species. The hardest thing is to think about them blinking out on our watch.”
Job cuts impair finely tuned ferret breeding
Few species demonstrate the power of conservation quite like the black-footed ferret. In the late 1800s, there were as many as a million living among prairie dog colonies in the plains, as far north as Saskatchewan and as far south as northern Mexico. But in the 1900s, extermination programs bankrolled by the US and state governments started killing off prairie dogs, which were viewed as pests that competed with cattle for forage.
These government-sanctioned exterminations collapsed prairie dog populations, in turn devastating black-footed ferrets. Without prairie dogs, ferrets had nothing to eat. Around the same time, fleas began spreading plague — yes, plague — in the Great Plains. That killed even more prairie dogs and ferrets, both of which are highly susceptible to the disease.
By the late ’70s, ferrets had vanished, and scientists considered them extinct.
But in the fall of 1981, a dog named Shep changed everything. Shep, a ranch dog in Wyoming, brought a carcass of a small mammal to his home near the northern town of Meeteetse. His owners didn’t recognize the animal and took it to a taxidermist, who identified it as a black-footed ferret. The carcass ultimately led wildlife officials to a nearby ferret colony — the last known one on Earth, home to about 130 animals.
With that, the extinct black-footed ferret was officially brought back from the dead. But just a few years after Shep’s discovery, all but 18 ferrets had died from plague and other threats. So with the specter of extinction looming once again, wildlife officials took them out of the wild and into captivity.
With those 18 ferrets, the Fish and Wildlife Service, along with Wyoming state wildlife officials, launched a captive breeding and recovery program in the late ’80s, determined to keep the species alive. The goal of the program, among the first of its kind in the country, was to breed ferrets under human care before eventually releasing them back into the prairie landscape. In a way, it was the reverse of the government interventions that had initially helped push the ferrets toward extinction.
The bedrock of this program is the Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center near Fort Collins, Colorado.
The center breeds most of the black-footed ferrets in the US today. It’s a painstaking process that involves carefully pairing individuals to make sure their babies will boost the population’s limited genetic diversity. (Officials use a genetic registry called a “studbook” to figure out the best pairs.) Remarkably, the center has also led groundbreaking efforts to clone black-footed ferrets that died decades ago. The cloning program, which is the first of its kind, is another way to inject new genetic diversity into the population to ensure its survival.
The ferret center is also critical for the survival of ferrets once they’ve been released. Researchers condition the animals for life in the wild — running them through what is essentially a predator bootcamp. Workers put the ferrets in outdoor pens with burrows and introduce live prairie dogs, typically once a week, for them to kill. After about 30 days, ferrets that have passed bootcamp muster get the okay to be released into the wild.
“The importance of the captive breeding center to the survival of the species is pretty huge,” said Steve Forrest, a biologist who’s long been involved in black-footed ferret conservation.
The recent job cuts will hamper the center’s breeding and training efforts, experts told Vox. The two technicians who were terminated cared for captive ferrets, which involved raising kits, preparing food, and observing them during preconditioning. Jackson, meanwhile, was the connective tissue across a wide range of partners, including the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and the nonprofit environmental group Defenders of Wildlife, which are all working to conserve black-footed ferrets. She led budget and staff meetings and made sure the breeding center had what it needed to keep running, Jackson said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service did not respond to a request for comment.
With funding on ice, wild ferrets may face a more severe threat of plague
Breeding black-footed ferrets is only half the challenge. The next step is making sure they survive once they’ve been released into the wild.
The main threat they face there is still plague, which is relatively common among prairie dog colonies in the Great Plains. It’s also a minor threat to humans. So across many of the more than 30 sites where ferrets have been reintroduced, workers from a range of organizations kill fleas in prairie dog burrows and vaccinate wild-born ferrets against plague. Captive-born animals are vaccinated before they’re released. This approach works, but it’s labor-intensive and costly: technicians have to treat burrows and trap wild-born ferrets across thousands of acres, year after year.
The bulk of funding for this work comes from the federal government, and much of that money is currently on ice. In the Conata Basin of South Dakota — home to the world’s largest wild population of ferrets — efforts to rid the landscape of plague are funded in part by the US Forest Service and the National Park Service, according to Travis Livieri, executive director of Prairie Wildlife Research, a nonprofit. That funding is currently frozen, Livieri said, adding that treating burrows typically starts as early as April.
“If we’re not able to do plague mitigation, it’s very possible that over the course of three or four or five years we could lose the wild ferret population,” a current Fish and Wildlife Service employee told Vox. (The employee requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press.) “Having a disruption in established plague mitigation programs is really problematic and an existential threat to wild black-footed ferret populations.”
Some federal funding for tribal nations to conserve black-footed ferrets has also been put on pause, according to Shaun Grassel, CEO of Buffalo Nations Grasslands Alliance (BNGA), a Indigenous-led conservation group, and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. Last year, BNGA won a $1.1 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit that routes both private and federal funding to environmental groups. The money was to help several tribes, such as the Cheyenne River Sioux, kill fleas, monitor ferrets, and oversee their reintroduction into the wild. At least half of that grant is funded by federal dollars, Grassel said, and now the whole thing is frozen.
“A freeze in certain federal funds will keep tribes from implementing their plague mitigation work,” Grassel said. If the freeze lasts much longer, “several tribal biologists are likely to lose their jobs,” he continued, “because all tribal work is funded by some grant program or another.”
The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
What’s especially frustrating to people involved in ferret conservation is that funding and staff resources were already limited heading into 2025. “So much conservation work is happening bare-bones right now, so when cuts come in there’s nothing left to cut,” Jackson said. “There’s no fat on the bones.”
And the sorts of dollar amounts for this work — for wildlife conservation, overall — are almost imperceptible compared to other federal line items. Last year, the budget for the entire Fish and Wildlife Service, which works to conserve all endangered plants and animals, was roughly $4 billion. That’s less than 3 percent of what the Department of Transportation spends, for example. Livieri says conservation practitioners are also working to make it cheaper, such as by using more innovative insecticides.
Concerned employees at the Fish and Wildlife Service are now scrambling to keep black-footed ferret work moving forward, the current employee told Vox. One idea is to bring in staff from other departments to care for ferrets at the breeding center, they said.
Yet the national coordination that the Fish and Wildlife Service provided will be hard to maintain without Jackson and uncertainty around funding. A number of meetings on the calendar will likely be canceled, Jackson told me. Plus, the Service is supposed to carry out a federally mandated five-year review of the black-footed ferret’s conservation status soon, which Jackson was meant to lead. It’s unclear who will now do that.
“It’s literally a matter of life and death [for these animals],” the current employee said. “We’re just trying to figure out how to keep the lights on.”
People within the conservation community are deeply concerned about the fate of endangered species under the Trump administration. But if there’s one thing that gives them hope for animals like the black-footed ferret, it’s the dedication they see in their colleagues.
“If at one point in this remarkable journey [of the black-footed ferret], somebody just decided that this isn’t worth it, they could have gone extinct,” the current employee said. “But there have always been enough people who care, and we’ve soldiered on. It could have failed so many times, but enough people cared that it didn’t.”
