In the book by Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, she has a section on prairie dogs or prayer dogs as some call them. They love to stand and welcome the sun and watch it set.
Here is a section from the book:
In 1950, government agents proposed to get rid of prairie dogs on some parts of the Navajo reservation in order to protect the roots of sparse desert grasses and thereby maintain some marginal grazing for sheep.
The Navajo elders objected, insisting, "If you kill all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain."
The amused officials assured the Navajo that there was no correlation between rain and prairie dogs and carried out their plan. The outcome was surprising only to the federal officials. The desert near Chilchinbito, Arizona became a virtual wasteland. Without the ground-turning process of the burrowing animals, the soil became solidly packed, unable to accept rain. Hard pan. The result: fierce runoff whenever it rained. What little vegetation remained was carried away by flash floods and a legacy of erosion.
