Prairie Dogs
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40 free Prairie Dogs trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Prairie dogs are some of the most watchable animals on the Great Plains. They stand guard on their mounds, greet their families, squabble over borders and vanish underground the moment something looks wrong. Behind the comedy is a surprisingly complicated society. This quiz turns the best fun facts about prairie dogs into multiple-choice questions. It covers what kind of animal a prairie dog really is, how towns and family groups are organized, what the alarm calls say, how the burrows are built, and which other creatures depend on them. Later questions follow the animals into the journals of early explorers, the pet trade, internet fame and the long argument between ranchers and conservationists. The questions suit wildlife fans, students working on an animal report, and anyone who has stopped at a roadside prairie dog town and wondered what all the noise was about. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more than when you started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The largest prairie dog town ever recorded, covering 25,000 square miles of Texas, held roughly how many animals?
400 million
400 million is the estimate reported for that single town around 1900; today most towns cover less than one square mile.
Q 02Which affectionate-looking greeting do prairie dogs share with their own family group but never with outsiders?
Kissing
Kissing, a quick touch of mouths, lets prairie dogs check who belongs to the family; members then often groom one another.
Q 03Despite the canine name, prairie dogs are burrowing rodents belonging to which animal family, alongside marmots?
Squirrels
Squirrels count prairie dogs among their ground-dwelling members, close cousins of woodchucks rather than of any dog.
Q 04Prairie dogs are rodents, so which doglike habit led early explorers to give the animals the second half of their name?
Barking
Barking is the prairie dog's warning call, a shrill yelp the animals often give while sitting upright at the burrow entrance.
Q 05Which endangered nocturnal predator of the plains depends on prairie dogs for up to 90 percent of its diet?
Black-footed ferret
Black-footed ferret numbers fell with the prairie dogs, and the species was declared extinct in 1979 before a small wild population was found two years later.
Q 06Which US president received a live prairie dog shipped east by the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson had sent the expedition west, and the prairie dog, caught on the plains in September 1804, survived the long journey to reach him.
Q 07A 2007 viral video of a prairie dog turning its head to dramatic music wrongly names which animal in its title?
Chipmunk
Chipmunk stuck as the title even though the five-second clip, from a Japanese TV variety show, stars a prairie dog. Its music comes from the film Young Frankenstein.
Q 08Which accidentally introduced disease can kill more than 99 percent of the prairie dogs in a colony?
Plague
Plague reaches prairie dogs through infected fleas; in wild rodents it is called sylvatic plague, and it is caused by the same bacterium as the bubonic form that strikes people.
Q 09Before a 2003 ban, pet-trade collectors pulled young prairie dogs from their burrows using which surprising tool?
A large vacuum
A large vacuum device sucked the young out of their tunnels each spring, because prairie dogs are hard to breed in captivity.
Q 10Because their towns feed and shelter so many other animals, ecologists give prairie dogs which label?
Keystone species
Keystone species hold an ecosystem together, and biologists count more than 170 kinds of vertebrate affected by prairie dog towns.
Q 11Before settlers arrived, prairie dogs often founded towns on land already grazed to the ground by herds of which animal?
Bison
Bison and prairie dogs helped each other: the big grazers kept the grass short, then came back to the towns for fresh, nutritious regrowth.
Q 12Ranchers long justified destroying prairie dog towns with the claim that the burrows broke the legs of which animals?
Horses
Horses were the supposed victims, yet a writer who spent years asking ranchers for a real case reported not finding a single example.
Q 13Named after the prairie dog's lookout pose, the slang term prairie dogging describes heads popping up in which setting?
A cubicle office
Q 21The prairie dog's scientific genus name, Cynomys, joins the Greek word for dog to the Greek for which other animal?
Mouse
Mouse is the second half: Cynomys comes from the Greek kuon, dog, and mus, mouse, though the animal is neither one.
Q 22Lewis and Clark noted in 1804 that the prairie dog had already been named by traders of which nationality?
French
French traders called them petits chiens, or little dogs, and William Clark recorded a village of the animals covering about four acres.
Q 23In 2003, pet prairie dogs in the Midwest passed which virus to people, its first appearance in the Western Hemisphere?
Monkeypox
Monkeypox, now called mpox, reached the prairie dogs from African rodents imported from Ghana and housed beside them by an Illinois dealer; every patient had been in contact with an infected prairie dog.
A cubicle office is where it happens: a noise sends several workers peering over their partition walls at once, like startled prairie dogs.
Q 14Which US president, namesake of a North Dakota national park, wrote that prairie dogs are never found singly?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt, who ranched in the Dakota badlands, also called prairie dogs the most noisy and inquisitive animals imaginable.
Q 15Prairie dogs clip down tall plants around their towns, even ones they never eat, mainly to gain which advantage?
A clear view of danger
A clear view of danger is the point: short plants leave a stalking coyote nowhere to hide, and the town ends up looking freshly mowed.
Q 16Burrowing owls nesting in old prairie dog burrows scare off intruders by imitating the sound of which other animal?
Rattlesnake
Rattlesnake noises, a rattle and a hiss made from underground, protect the owls, which rarely dig burrows of their own.
Q 17How did Lewis and Clark's men finally capture a live prairie dog on the plains in September 1804?
Pouring water down its hole
Pouring water down its hole worked only after hours of effort: five barrels vanished into one burrow without filling it.
Q 18Biologist Con Slobodchikoff, who records prairie dog alarm calls, argues that the animals possess a simple form of what?
Language
Language is his word for it: he reports that the calls encode what kind of predator is coming, its size, its color and its speed.
Q 19Which word for a tight-knit circle of friends do biologists also use for a family group of black-tailed prairie dogs?
Coterie
Coterie is the term, and a typical one holds a single adult male, several adult females and their offspring, all sharing one defended territory.
Q 20A large prairie dog town is split by physical barriers into sections, each with several family groups, called what?
Wards
Wards is the term, borrowed from city maps, and a single town may hold 15 to 26 family groups spread among them.
Q 24What happens when one black-tailed prairie dog performs a jump-yip, rearing up with forefeet in the air and calling?
Neighbors copy the move
Neighbors copy the move in a wave across the town, and the animal that started it seems to use the response to judge how watchful the others are.
Q 25Black-tailed prairie dog burrows include a small chamber near the entrance that the animals use for which purpose?
Listening for predators
Listening for predators before surfacing is its job, while the grass-lined nesting chamber sits far deeper, near the bottom of the burrow.
Q 26Which city's Double-A baseball team, the Sod Poodles, takes its name from a local nickname for the prairie dog?
Amarillo
Amarillo got the Sod Poodles in 2019, when a franchise moved from San Antonio; the team plays at a ballpark called Hodgetown.
Q 27The Prairie Dog Town Fork, which flows through Palo Duro Canyon, is one of the two main forks of what?
Red River
Red River is formed by two major forks, and this southern one bears a name translated from a Comanche phrase meaning Prairie Dog Town River.
Q 28A prairie dog town lines the park road at which rock formation, the first national monument in the United States?
Devils Tower
Devils Tower has a small town of several hundred prairie dogs on about 40 acres, and rangers ask visitors never to feed them.
Q 29Which threatened species, marked by dark eyebrows and a tiny range, is the smallest of the five kinds of prairie dog?
Utah
Utah prairie dog colonies live only in the southwest of that one state, where the species has been federally listed as threatened since 1984.
Q 30Canada's only black-tailed prairie dog colonies live in and around Grasslands National Park, in which province?
Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan marks the northern tip of a range that once ran all the way south to Chihuahua in Mexico.