prairie dog

prairie dog

1. To pop one's head up, especially from below or behind something or some surface, in a manner resembling a prairie dog emerging from its burrow. Everyone started prairie dogging in their cubicles to see where the music was coming from. The puppy prairie dogged the moment she heard the bag of treats being opened.
2. vulgar slang To need to defecate so badly that one's feces begin to come out through the anus involuntarily. I need to find a bathroom now—I'm starting to prairie dog! I was prairie dogging it by the time we finally got to a rest stop.
See also: dog
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

prairie dog

in. [for people in office cubicles] to pop up to see what’s going on in the rest of the office. Everybody was prairie dogging to see what was going on.
See also: dog
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • turtle head
  • turtle heading
  • (from) top to toe
  • at (one's) doorstep
  • at doorstep
  • in common
  • in common (with someone or something)
  • in common with somebody/something
  • at expense
  • at somebody's expense
References in periodicals archive
(2014) also found a higher number of native plants within prairie dog colonies compared to undisturbed areas.
In 2010, thirty-two ranchers on the Western grasslands of South Dakota sued both the SDGFP and the South Dakota Department of Agriculture in state court for ongoing property damage allegedly caused by prairie dog encroachment from federal lands.
Back when Asia was connected to North America via a land bridge, Siberian ferrets crossed into North America and made their way onto the prairies where they discovered they could feast on prairie dog colonies, which ranged from southern Canada to northern Mexico and from Utah to eastern Kansas.
"Let's face it: The prairie dogs are out there waiting for you," said Hoffman, whose stores (they also have a location in Mitchell, S.D.) carry a strong selection of youth-oriented hunting rifles.
Hoogland found that prairie dog killers and their offspring had fewer fleas than nonkillers and their offspring, "but this trend was not significant," he says.
Prairie dogs work together to gather and share food with the rest of their family group.
The black-tailed prairie dog is a keystone species from the grasslands of North America that can modulate the assemblages of small mammals within their colonies (Ceballos et al., 1999; Cully et al., 2010).
"Prairie dogs are excellent models for a study of polyandry because they are easy to livetrap, mark, and observe.
Still, the most formidable challenge facing ferret recovery is whether suitable prairie dog habitat will be available to achieve the objectives of establishing enough multiple, viable populations of black-footed ferrets in the wild.
Cattle grazed all four sites, and three of the sites had other disturbances--either by fires or by prairie dogs. Augustine found the highest densities of plovers were on the burned sites and among prairie dog colonies.
Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to list the black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus; BTPD) as threatened throughout its range (USFWS 1999, Van Putten & Miller 1999).
At nearly 100 pages, Zack the Prairie Dog is surprisingly longer than most children's picture books.
Black-footed ferrets once seemed locked in the eternal predator-prey dance with prairie dogs. But as prairie dog populations, once numbering in the hundreds of millions, were deeply reduced through poisoning and farming practices, ferret numbers too began losing ground.
Ferrets occur exclusively on prairie dog Cynomys sp.