I don’t especially care where they hold the USDAA Nationals. Well, really close to my house would be excellent, but we had a great time flying on a plane and seeing the sights of Kentucky last year. Colorado is beautiful, and somewhat, sort of, closeish to California. To get there from my house, you drive across the loneliest highway over deserts and mountains, stop at the taxidermy grocery store, go through Utah, pass lots of antler installations, and then keep on going for a long time. You can listen to every David Sedaris story in the ipod 4 times and take advantage of many scenic opportunities for rock mining, alien hunting and dog running. So much so it’s probably more fun driving there than just being there.

Our going to USDAA Nationals depends on a careful balance of how much money I have jingling around in my pockets, and how my dogs are running. Less money jingling in pockets means going somewhere closer to home is more feasible, but me and the dogs need to be running in truly awesome form if we’re going to fly or drive to lands further away than Turlock for a dog agility show. Missing lots of work means way less money to jingle in pockets on such a grand journey. Even though my dogs were qualified to go, we skipped it during the Arizona years due to the whole jingling problem.

Big huge dog shows like this mean oodles of jingling, jangling money flying out of the pockets of competitors and into the city where they’re competing. So isn’t it weird for a national dog organization to dump money in the buckets of a city that has voted out an entire breed of dog? Personally, I’m a little bit afraid of pitbulls. I do think they’re very cute, and I adore the nice ones that belong to friends, but I’ve also had run-ins with scary loose ones in my neighborhood more than once. Timmy had to be rescued from one and came out of it with puncture wounds in his neck. I’ve beaten one off with a chunk of wood on my street.

But banning them? These dogs are banned from a whole cluster of cities because they’re potential bad dogs. I suspect there are way more nice pitbulls than scary ones out there, the bad ones just get all the press. Breed specific legislation is like racial profiling for dogs. I duck and cover from an evil labradoodle all the time, and there’s a chocolate lab that I always cross the street to stay far, far away from. Ban the chocolate lab’s lady, that’s who needs to be banned. I don’t hold anything against those dogs, it’s their people that have the problems. The Denver laws euthanizes dogs that haven’t done anything to anyone. Done nothing but been a pitbull.

So this is where I’m confused. The legislation is in place, been there for years. Why would a big dog organization that is all about a fun sport for all breeds of dogs dogs want to bring lots of dog people to a town that has kicked out or euthanized all the dogs of one breed? There seems to be a very large chunk of irony here. It would be one thing if it was a convention of llama fanciers or ferrett folk. But a huge, national dog sports organization like USDAA encouraging all it’s members to come on in and drop some serious change in a town that disallows a certain kind of dog? What if it was border collies instead of pitbulls?

Maybe someone can explain this to me? Because I am scratching my head over here on this one.