Legislators are busy as Bruce bees in Pierre these days for their annual go at about 500 proposed new laws for us to abide by.

On average, about half of the bills are approved. If that’s the case, in my lifetime in South Dakota, there have been 25,000 new laws created that are intended to make my life better.

Among all those laws are such legislative time wasters as bills declaring kuchen our official state dessert, the fiddle our official state musical instrument, and Houdek our official state dirt.

The governor could just as well issue decrees on these things and save a whole lot of time and money now spent of such life-altering things like kuchen, fiddles and dirt.

Over the years we’ve been entertained by the antics of a few who arrive in Pierre with a sense of humor and who aren’t taking themselves too seriously. We’ve also appreciated the work in our state Capitol of serious men and women who have had the best interests of our state in mind, because the world isn’t all kuchen and Houdek soil.

Consider the 1905 legislative session.

Among laws introduced back then was one requiring locomotives have an electric front light. It passed despite the foot stomping of railroaders.

Strangely, thanks to the power of lobbyists, state law in 1905 prevented South Dakotans from burning Kansas kerosene. The problem with Kansas kerosene was something about color, chemical content and competition, fancy-pants lobbyists contended.

A bill to approve its use was introduced, and one legislator, to make his point that there was no danger in the Kansas product, kept a lamp filled with Kansas kerosene flickering away on his desk every day of the session.       

There was also a bed sheet law to require sheets in hotels and on Pullman railroad cars be seven feet or longer.

The rationale was that sheets on hotel and railroad beds often weren’t changed every day. They were just reversed. The foot end became the next day’s head end.

Bed sheets seven feet would allow the sheet’s head end to be folded down so the sleeper’s nose was close to a cleaner part of yesterday’s sheet, and not near the part where the previous occupant had rested his or her smelly tootsies.

That one didn’t pass.

That ninth session also considered a bill from a Sioux Falls legislator who was responding to the wishes of the Sioux Falls Coursers Club.

Then it was considered sport in hoity-toity places like Sioux Falls to own hounds to run down jackrabbits, called coursing. But the rabbits were being hunted to the extent that coursing wasn’t much fun anymore.

Hence a bill was introduced to ban the public from hunting jackrabbits except during a season in order to conserve rabbits so that the Sioux Falls wealthy would have something to course with during the course of the rest of the year.

Rural legislators considered that a bunch of horse hooey. The rural folks also weren’t too happy that they were required to round up their cattle each year and run them through a dipping trough. Ten days later they had to do it all over again, the law required.  

So after the introduction of the jackrabbit season bill, an unsigned bill appeared on legislators’ desks requiring landowners to round up all jackrabbits and run them through a rabbit dip.    

Twice!

The Sioux Falls Coursing Club howled as their coursing bill failed.

If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.