The Amazing Comeback Story of the Black-Footed Ferret of the American West

A dog, a family cattle ranch, and the cutest little carnivore you ever did see—these are the beginnings of the incredible recovery story of the black-footed ferret of the American prairie, an animal once thought extinct. As it unfolds, we learn what people from all corners can do when they work together and how cloning is offering new hope for the future of wildlife conservation.

It’s the subject of a recent episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild, as well as its new companion podcast that dives deeper into topics covered on the show. After all, the show, which is a revival of the original long-running and beloved Wild Kingdom series that first aired on NBC in 1963, is a mere 22 minutes after three, four, and sometimes up to 10 days of filming for each episode.

Country Living sat down with the show and podcast’s co-hosts, Peter Gros, a wildlife expert and educator who you might remember as a co-host on the original Wild Kingdom series in the ’80s, and Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, a wildlife ecologist who was inspired by the series and other wildlife shows as a child, to talk about this bona fide country comeback.

It all began in 1981 on a ranch in Meeteetse, Wyoming, home to generations of the Hogg family for more than a century. According to Allen Hogg’s telling on the show, his father found a small, deceased animal in the yard, apparently killed by the ranch’s dog. He brought it inside to show Allen’s mother at breakfast, and she found the creature curious indeed—and she was right.

The animal was a black-footed ferret, once abundant in the American West with a range that stretched into Canada and Mexico, but by the 1980s the species was believed to have been wiped out.

Yet, sure enough, a small colony of black-footed ferrets was found on the Hogg ranch. And so it was that Shep the dog turned the conservation world on its head, and a new recovery effort began.

“If it hadn’t been for a good old Shep, that canine companion bringing home a gift to the ranch house, who knows what would have happened to those few remaining ferrets,” Peter tells Country Living.

Today in Meeteetse, the town that he put on the map with his discovery, Shep is a bit of a legend.

Domesticated ferrets kept as pets are not native to the U.S., but black-footed ferrets have been part of the American prairie ecosystem for about 100,000 years, according to fossil records, and are the only ferret species native here. Still, the two species have a lot in common. Both are adorable and charismatic, and they look quite similar except for their markings on their face and feet. But don’t be fooled—unlike any pet ferret, black-footed ferrets are formidable predators for their size and have the biggest teeth in relation to their body of any carnivore.

Black-footed ferret

Whereas you might feed a domesticated ferret small mice, “the black footed ferret in the wild is going to eat prey that is larger than its body [specifically, prairie dogs], which is just pretty freaking incredible,” Rae tells Country Living. “The wild behavior is something that you’re not ever going to see in a domesticated ferret, and that’s something that’s just super fascinating and very, very necessary in these wild landscapes.”

Prairie dogs, rodents in the squirrel family, are not only a primary food source for black-footed ferrets—their burrows provide a habitat for them too.

Black-footed ferret at home in a prairie dog burrow

“If prairie dogs didn’t have predators like black-footed ferrets,” Peter says, “the population would become out of control, and that would lead to a breakdown of wild plants that they eat, lead to erosion around rivers and make them shallower. Shallow water gets hotter than the deep water and causes evaporation. So you have water loss, and then the fish can’t survive in it and other animals lose their food source. So it’s a very complex web.”

That web worked well for thousands of years and in harmony with indigenous tribes, until everything changed. As the U.S.’s westward expansion progressed in the 19th century, prairie dogs became unwelcome on the ranches and farms that moved in (like cows, prairie dogs eat grass). The effort to eradicate prairie dogs had a devastating effect on the black-footed ferret that relied on them for food as well as habitat. Disease and plague also took their toll on the species.

Today things are turning around, and some private landowners like the Hogg family, whose ranch stretches over an expansive tract of prairie, are now an essential part of the black-footed ferret’s recovery and conservation. On the show, Peter takes us to the Hogg ranch where we see black-footed ferrets thriving in their natural habitat.

There’s a ferret in this photo of Peter. Do you see it?

On the podcast, guest Jeff Ewelt, executive director of ZooMontana, explains that the Hogg family and their neighbors understand the importance of the conservation project.

“They understand how to rotate their livestock so well to ensure recovery times for grasses for prairie dogs, which then support the black-footed ferret,” he says. “Landowners can be understandably concerned about what it means for (their) livelihood,” he adds, but he wants them to know it doesn’t have to be invasive. “You can work with the U.S. government, the wildlife experts. You can make a difference with little effort.”

Of course, private landowners are only one part of the solution. In 1987, after disease took the original colony on the Hogg ranch down to only 18, the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center in Colorado was founded to take in the last remaining ferrets and breed them in captivity, with the goal of reintroducing them into the wild.

Working with the center to make the project a success is a broad network that comprises AZA accredited zoos (zoos that meet the high standards of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums for conservation, research, education, and animal welfare), government agencies, private landowners, volunteers, and tribal communities, such as the Standing Rock Sioux. Reintroduction efforts are happening in multiple states, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, including Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Kansas, as well as Canada and Mexico.

Peter recalls one person they interviewed for the episode observing that it takes a family to save an endangered species. “In this case, it truly did,” he says.

Ferret at the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center in Colorado

Now for the final puzzle piece: the cutting-edge science happening at the Frozen Zoo, a research center within the San Diego Zoo in California. The Frozen Zoo houses living skin cells for hundreds of nearly extinct animal species.

Until recently, every known black-footed ferret alive in the 21^st century carried the DNA of just seven ferrets from the colony on the Hogg ranch—that is, those who were taken into captivity at the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center and also went on to reproduce. Recently, that number went up to eight.

Ferrets peer out of an artificial burrow at the conservation center that mimics their habitat.

Number eight is Willa, one of the original ferrets brought to the conservation center. Though she never reproduced in her lifetime, in 1988 before she died, some of her cells were collected, frozen, and stored at the Frozen Zoo.

In 2020, a black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann was born, cloned from Willa’s genetic material. The event was history-making: She is not only the first clone of a North American endangered species, but also she brings a fresh bloodline to the recovery effort. With it comes invaluable genetic diversity and potentially added disease resistance.

Elizabeth Ann now lives at the conservation center in Colorado too.

Since then, two more clones of Willa, Noreen and Antonia, have been born, but the Frozen Zoo banks much more than just that one DNA source.

“Every single ferret that has ever lived since Willa, which is not very many, their DNA has been captured,” Rae says, “and often multiple copies of a single individual’s DNA.”

It’s an invaluable backup for a delicate recovery. After all, we learn in the podcast, there was a previous black-footed ferret colony discovered in the 1970s, but conservation efforts failed and that colony died out. The effort to save and greatly expand the colony discovered on the Hogg ranch in the 1980s has been successful so far.

But should the worst happen, the genetic material housed at the Frozen Zoo could save the day, not only for the black-footed ferret but for hundreds of other critical species too.

How can you help? Of course, not everyone lives on a large tract of land or within the black-footed ferret’s potential range, but there are many ways to get involved in wildlife conservation. That’s what Peter and Rae hope to convey on the show and in the conversations happening on the new companion podcast.

“I think one of our biggest goals for the podcast is to reinforce how all different kinds of people are conservationists,” Rae says. “It’s not just people like me and Peter who work day in, day out, hosting a show, or the scientists that we have on it, but it can be someone who’s just minding their business on their ranch, playing with their dog. It can be someone who just takes a peek into their backyard and notices something different.”

For those who do have a large amount of land, Rae wants them to understand that they have a lot of power as landowners.

“For them to think of their land as potential sites for wildlife conservation could be really empowering,” she says. “It might encourage people to make small changes, maybe they reduce pesticides, change out their mainstream grass for native grass species, maybe they reduce some fencing. There’s all kinds of things people can do that encourage wildlife to rebound in a lot of these critical areas, and that’s a way that lots of your readers can think of themselves as conservation heroes as well.”

Black-footed ferret on the Hogg family ranch

And if you don’t have a parcel of land, even if you just have a small outside patio area, Peter says, “You can plant things that attract pollinators or food for migrating butterflies or shelter wildlife. Any place that you live, be it in the city, or the country, or on a large ranch, there are certain things that you can do to learn about how to participate and help give wildlife a helping hand.”

Two sources he recommends to get started: “Go to wildkingdom.com,” he says, “and if they’d really like to learn about wildlife, go to NBC on Saturday mornings and watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild.”

Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild on NBC is TV’s no. 1 weekend wildlife series, reaching an average of more than 1.1 million weekly viewers. It airs Saturday mornings on NBC’s “The More You Know” programming block and is available on NBC.com. Find to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom The Podcast on the Audacy app, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere podcasts are available. New podcast episodes will be released weekly on Tuesdays through October 1.

Terri Robertson

Terri Robertson is the Senior Editor, Digital, at Country Living, where she shares her lifelong love of homes, gardens, down-home cooking, and antiques.