Carol and I got a puppy from the Caldwell pound, a husky mix, white, seven months old. I slept in the living room with her last night while she settled in. She has kennel cough so we are walking her at night and in the early morning so she doesn't touch noses with all the other dogs which she so very much wants to meet. With bird flu mixing with swine flu and all of us mixing in airports, schools and at concerts from here to the tip of the nation to the south of us, it is hard not to feel for Bighorn Sheep in their canyons across southern and central Idaho. They meet a wooly domestic sheep and wet noses touch and its all over, potentially for entire herds of what is left of the bighorns. Viruses and bacteria hitch hike from one of us to the next across the globe. DNA mixing and then multiplying until the microbes run out of habitat, like bighorns coming up over the canyon rim when rafters set up camps below and the jet boats roar. And so under a bill we just passed out of the Senate, someone will load up the roaming bighorns who touched noses with the wooly sheep and send them off in trucks elsewhere, perhaps to infect a different herd than their own. The wooly sheep, with their own germs, stay, migrate out of the hills in the winter to pick up more disease and come back in the spring. And here in the statehouse, more than anywhere, we all shake hands, touch noses, move on.