The Prairie Dog Has Always Been Considered a Problem for Canadian

question 23

Essay

The prairie dog has always been considered a problem for Canadian cattle ranchers.They dig holes that cattle and horses can step in,and they eat grass necessary for cattle.Recently,ranchers have discovered that there is a demand for prairie dogs as pets.In some areas,prairie dogs can sell for as high as $150.Cattlemen are now fencing off prairie dog towns on their land so these towns will not be disturbed by their cattle.Draw a production possibilities frontier demonstrating a rancher's production option between cattle production and prairie dog production,showing increasing opportunity cost and what would happen in each of the following situations (using a separate graph for each situation):
a.The outcome is efficient,with ranchers choosing to produce equal numbers of cattle and prairie dogs.
b.As a protest against the government introducing the grey wolf back into the wild in their province,ranchers decide not to use 25% of the available grassland for grazing.
c.The price of prairie dogs increases to $200 each,so ranchers decide to allot additional land for prairie dogs.
d.The government grants new leases to ranchers,giving them 10,000 new hectares of grassland each for grazing.
e.A drought destroys most of the available grass for grazing of cattle,but not prairie dogs since they also eat plant roots.

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Definitions:

Classical Conditioning

A learning process in which a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a meaningful stimulus and acquires the capacity to elicit similar responses.

Observational Learning

A form of social learning where behaviors are learned by watching and imitating others.

Modeling

Demonstrating a behavior to imitate a behavior that was previously observed.

Partial Reinforcement

A conditioning strategy in which a reward is not administered every time the desired behavior is performed, leading to more resilient behavior than with continuous reinforcement.