The Perfect Country and Western song

By Anna Sadler

How I wish I were a Country & Western songwriter. My mournful ballad would begin with a longing for the gool ol' days when humane societies were actually humane, and when animal rights meant your beloved pet's right to take up the largest part of the sofa or curl up next to the hearth, warmed by both the roaring fire and by its human's love.

The second verse might reminisce about when Old Blue was a pup, and the family gathered around to enjoy Blue and his littermates frolicking in the yard without extremists pointing accusing fingers and turning us in because Blue's dam hadn't been spayed.

Waylon Jennings would sing my country and western song in that wonderful, gravelly voice, because Waylon would never be taken in political correctness born of well-rehearsed rhetoric. Waylon surely knows the joy of birthing foals, the peace of the herd of cattle lowing in evening breezes, and knows that the pleasure of a steak dinner can't be all wrong, because man and beast serve one another in this perfect universe.

As the second verse flows into the third of my country and western song, Waylon would shift slightly in his creaking, well-worn leather saddle, flick cow patties off his ostrich hide boots, and sing of the sunlit days gone by when he and Blue rode through the new-mown hay without a pooper scooper or even a leash.

My song would have Waylon singing about those carefree days of youth when he and Old Blue would venture into the crisp fall mornings in search of that elusive covy of quail. Boy and dog in perfect harmony would flush it into the morning sky for the perfect shot with the old double-barrel, but that was before the noisy protesters scared all the quail into the next state while littering the pasture with mountains of anti-hunting flyers.

The next verse would have Waylon crooning about Miss Mona and her Chicken Ranch. He would recollect in song the days when the local constables were more concerned about Mona's activities as a cat house to service local college lads than they were about her breeding and showing her Siamese cats in violation of the limit and non-display ordinances.

The dusty excitement of the rodeo, with Old Blue looking on from beneath where the horses are tethered would be the next verse, as Waylon remembers in song those long-ago times when children's eyes drank in the skill of the sport ... those days before circuses and rodeos were banned. That was when "that old gang of mine" meant the group that hung out at the soda parlor eating burgers and fries instead of street toughs who firebomb McDonald's in the name of animal rights.

And finally, Waylon would ease his parched vocal chords with a cold Lone Star beer, even though he would have rather had the milk now denied him since the Vegan Bill was enacted. Old Blue has passed on to his great reward. He might still be alive had the medical research not been halted that might have led to his heart beating a few years longer.

And the innocent days of youth are only a memory preserved in my country and western song.