By playing a role in the near-annihilation of a species, Theodore Roosevelt, the president of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, unwittingly laid the groundwork for the most dramatic triumph yet in the use of artificial insemination (AI) to rescue a species from extinction. In the early 1900s, waves of immigrants from Europe settled in the American Midwest. As humans transformed the land, they declared war on a perceived pest: the prairie dog. That might have seemed an affront to Roosevelt, an ardent conservationist who was once quoted as saying, ‘When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel as if all.
