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Nobody notices if you gas or poison prairie dogs in Colorado, but just invite some folks over to shoot at the little pests, and the entire state establishment is in an uproar.
Note, though, that no one has expressed much sympathy for the prairie dogs. Hawks, coyotes and snakes kill them by the thousands. It's even permissible for people to kill the critters, just as long as the executions are performed mechanically and dispassionately. But the moment somebody tries to have some fun with a chore that apparently has to be done anyway, the denunciations appear.
Several centuries ago, English mobs enjoyed going to
arenas where a shackled bear was beset by dogs.
Bear-baiting
was a cruel spectacle outlawed by the
puritans when they gained power, but as the great historian
Thomas Babington Macaulay observed, The puritan hated
bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but
because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Our latter-day puritans oppose a prairie-dog hunt, not because it kills small furry animals, but because it gives pleasure to the shooters.
There's more, of course. The Coalition to Make Colorado a Holistic Non-Threatening Experience for Non-Fur-Wearing Vegetarian Aspenites Who Drive Trendy Foreign Cars with Mountain Bicycle Racks -- i.e., the same people you'd find on the Josie Heath campaign committee -- has caught the governor's ear.
He says the hunt is a bad idea because the publicity will make a bad impression.
Economic development might suffer: We can't build our
new minimum-wage toxic-fume plant out in Colorado, even
though they're giving us tax abatements and some big
subsidies. They carry guns there, and if those rubes catch
on to what we're doing to them before we're done ripping
and running, it could be funeral time. Why don't we poison
the water in Indiana, instead?
So might tourism. Pamela, shall we winter in
Telluride or St. Moritz this year?
Oh, Courtney,
isn't Telluride in Colorado, that dreadful state where the
philistines gleefully dispatch Cynomys leucurus?
And
there we lose a valuable visitation from the right kind of
people, just because Colorado hosted an event that drew the
wrong kind of people.
If there were an ancient Ute ritual that involved public
prairie-dog hunting, it would be a major tourist event and
evidence of Colorado's pluralism
and cultural
diversity.
Nobody would complain, because that's an
acceptable culture these days.
The rural redneck lifestyle with the varmint rifle in
the pickup's gun rack -- that's an unacceptable culture at
the moment, and the people who find it most unacceptable
are our new-age puritans who otherwise extol cultural
diversity.
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