Content area
Full text
Colorado, as Ed Quillen noted recently, has two state songs, a state bird, a state fossil, a state butterfly, a state mineral and a state fish. And, despite Douglas Bruce's callous and unreasoning opposition, we might soon have a state reptile, the Western Painted Turtle.
Now, all of those designations are fine, I suppose, but they share one characteristic: no one much cares.
Do you lose sleep because you don't have a gleaming specimen of the state mineral (rhodochrosite) on your desk?
Do you sing the state song ("Friends around the campfire/Everybody's high!/Rocky Mountain High, Colorado ...") in the shower? For your family's sake, I certainly hope not.
Would you recognize the state butterfly (the Colorado hairstreak) if one landed on your snout? Of course not -- and that's why we need to have an official state designation for something that people actually care about.
That means -- are you ready? -- an official state dog!
How many Coloradoans own a hunk of rhodochrosite or still have an old John Denver album? Two or three hundred at most! And how many dog owners are there? More than a million.
That fact alone would assure...