Prairie Dogs are the Anarchists of the Animal kingdom

About a decade ago, when I was in the midst of writing The Trench Angel, my wife found a stuffed prairie dog online (not stuffed as in taxidermied by some dude in a double wide, but stuffed as in "stuffed animal.") She then drew the anarchist sign on his belly to make him look like a 70s British Punk badass. He's been hanging out in my office ever since. 

The title of the post comes from a speach an anarchist makes in the novel to explain his politics to his grown, distant son. It was one of the sillier parts of the novel, but also one my favorites. “The prairie dog cares none for the trappings of civilized life—our fences, our churches, and our factories—he knows them for what they are: artificial constructions of a moneyed class that seeks to subsume nature to further the bases of sins and that sin is avarice…the prairie dog is a separatist, forming its own egalitarian society, ignoring the artificial rights of property owners, living as one body, yet preserving the rights of each individual prairie dog to choose his own path. Pure damn anarchy.”