14 Prairie Dogs Mysteriously Vanish Without A Trace From Texas Zoo

Fourteen prairie dogs mysteriously disappeared from a Texas zoo — and to this day, nobody knows where they are.

The group of burrowing creatures went missing from the El Paso Zoo in March 2022, KFOXTV reports, citing an inspection report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture from January. The prairie dogs were last seen on September 26, 2021.

El Paso Zoo Director Joe Montisano said zoo staff noticed the animals' food wasn't going away as much, and then it stopped diminishing altogether. "We knew there was a problem. Therefore, we had to find the prairie dogs basically," he said.

Zoo staff left no stone unturned when searching the exhibit, but found no trace of the prairie dogs. "We found no remnants, no bones, no fur, no blood like they've been, or no dead animals. Even they could have had a disease. It was a mystery really," Montisano said.

The working theory that the El Paso Zoo and USDA came up with is that an "outside predator" made its way into the exhibit and took the animals away "during a four- to six-week period." "The theory that us and the USDA as well, that's our governing agency, kinda came up with is it must have been a hawk that found out they were easy prey and came and grabbed them and took them out of the exhibit," Montisano said. In addition to a hawk, there was also a "feral cat" spotted near the exhibit.

The whereabouts of the prairie dogs remain unknown.

The El Paso Zoo is currently in the process of upping its security measures to keep the new prairie dogs, which is it trying to acquire from other zoos, safe inside their exhibit. Montisano expects the prairie dog exhibit to be up and running sometime this summer.

News of the missing prairie dogs comes weeks after a case at the Dallas Zoo comes to a close after a man was arrested for stealing two monkeys from the campus.