03/11/08 Paying Tribute Pt. 2

Paying Tribute Part 2. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Bethany Braley is on a mission, to pay tribute to the knight of the West; the American cowboy. She is spearheading the National Day of the Cowboy, now in its third year and while a lot of people think it's a good idea, getting states to recognize the event has been an uphill battle. BRALEY: Right now we are trying to get each governor to proclaim July as National Cowboy Heritage Month in their state so I put together a governor proclamation that I've actually sent to the Governor of Arizona. I tried to include different historic and social aspects relevant to the State of Arizona asking her to then declare July as Arizona Cowboy Heritage Month and then I'll send that to anybody as a prototype so that they can look up some western statistics that relates to their state. They can put that in a proclamation request to their governor and that way we might be able to get a lot of governors to proclaim July as their states cowboy heritage month thus helping us to convince the judiciary committee that there is national interest because that's really what's keeping it from being permanent. Here in the good old USA there are many events and organizations that help keep the cowboy alive like the Single Action Shooting Society and cowboy poetry events. Braley says there are people all over the world that just love the cowboy. BRALEY: Whatever the reasons are that people love cowboys and I think it goes back to what we talked about earlier, the ethics, the way they conduct themselves, the way they care the animals and care for the land; people around the world can share that regardless of their gender or their geography or their ethnicity or their generation or their politics even. There are people all over the world who love the American cowboy. Our version of the cowboy whether they learned about him in the movies or encountered him here in America it's really something special because there just aren't that many things that people in the world can agree upon and can celebrate together but definitely the love of the cowboy is one of them. So if you love the cowboy and would like to help out Braley suggests stopping by their website and she has a number of ways to get involved. BRALEY: You can become a member. We have one for like kids that's $10 and one that's kind of for an individual that's $35 and to become a member you can just go to our website or you can just email me bethany@nationaldayofthecowboy.com and I can send you the information. I keep working to get the word out and to build coalition and to try to report on things going on all over the country so I can use volunteers. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.