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Letting go is difficult after going afield with a good dog • South Dakota Searchlight

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Letting go is difficult after going afield with a good dog • South Dakota Searchlight


Mary knew it was time before I did. Or maybe I should say she admitted it before I could.

Giving up on a dog, even when it’s pretty clearly time, can be difficult. And I needed some help from my wife, and from our vet, in recognizing the obvious.

So the time for Rosie, our 14-year-old springer spaniel, came one day last week, after a two-year decline that accelerated over the last six months and especially the last six or eight weeks.

Mary was home sick, so I sat alone with Rosie in an examination room at the animal clinic, talking to her and stroking her head and side as she drifted off, giving in peacefully to the sedative the vet had injected a few minutes earlier. Then I started to sob as I touched the call button summoning the vet and her assistant, who was pushing a cart that would take Rosie into the room where the final drug would be administered.

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“I’m so sorry,” the vet said. “We’ll take good care of her.”

Kevin Woster’s dog, Rosie. (Courtesy of Kevin Woster)

I left Rosie in their gentle hands and wept my way out of the exam room, down the hall, through the lobby and on to my pickup.

And when I settled in behind the wheel, I felt Rosie’s leash in the pocket of my jacket and acknowledged through my tears that a dog that had been such an important “is” in my life had become a “was.”

I do not mean to overstate the emotions of this. Obviously, the loss of a dog is not the same as the loss of a human being. But it is the loss of a life. A life that mattered.

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For most of her 14 years with us, Rosie was a high-energy force of nature in our home and out across the wild lands of our state, leading me with the gift of her nose through mucky cattails and dense upland grasses and deep-woods aspen groves.

East River. West River. Missouri River country. Black Hills highlands. We explored them all, wet and dry, windy and calm, hot and cold and quite a bit in-between.

She loved best the kind of difficult-to-traverse coverts that Pennsylvania writer Charles Fergus called “thick and uncivil sorts of places,” and I got to know them better and love them more deeply by sharing them with her.

Oh, the things you can learn by going afield with a good dog. Magical, enduring things, about the outdoors, about the dog, about yourself.

We watched more sundowns together than I could count, usually when a bird hunt was done, we were both tired and fulfilled and often enjoying the added gift of coyote song. Rosie always raised her ears and cocked her head at the music, listening intently as if trying to decipher some canine-encrypted code.

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The call of the wild? Of course. And she understood it much better than I did.

Oh, the things you can learn by going afield with a good dog. Magical, enduring things, about the outdoors, about the dog, about yourself.

But she wasn’t just a strong bird dog. She also was a talented backyard escape artist and unreconstructed garbage gut with a special affinity for kids’ sweat socks, the sweatier and dirtier the better.

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I’ll skip the undignified details about how those socks, once swallowed, worked their way out, one way or the other. But Rosie processed a dozen or so over the years, with great effort but without requiring emergency room care.

She was a licker, not a fighter, that dog, known in our family and throughout our neighborhood for her sweet, outgoing personality. And she was especially fond and tolerant of the 19 grandchildren — now ranging in age from a gainfully employed college graduate to a toddler — who got to bask in her affection and be her pal.

I bought her from a kennel out in the James River breaks when she was eight weeks old and officially named her James River Rose. But I rarely called her anything but Rosie.

She was the most headstrong and challenging dog I’ve had to train, or to control in the field, but also the most athletic and relentless on bird scent. And despite the occasional adrenaline-driven indiscretion, at her core Rosie aimed to please.

She was six months old when she flushed and retrieved her first prairie grouse and a few weeks older when she did the same with her first rooster pheasant. And a year or two later, she led me to three ruffed grouse — a noteworthy limit on the first day I ever saw a Black Hills ruffy — in a disorderly gathering of willow and aspen and birch deep in a spring-fed hollow up off Tinton Road south of Spearfish.

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Kevin Woster's dog, Rosie, while retrieving a bird. (Courtesy of Kevin Woster)
Kevin Woster’s dog, Rosie, while retrieving a bird. (Courtesy of Kevin Woster)

She made a four-hour round-trip drive for a two-hour hunt worth it every time, even if all we trailed and flushed were a couple of hen pheasants. “No shot, girl,” I would say, and I praised her just as effusively as if we’d bagged three roosters.

She was puzzled whenever I missed a bird, ecstatic when I hit one and even in the most inhospitable of cover rarely missed a retrieve.

When we weren’t hunting pheasants or grouse, we were often up on the trails in the forest above our house in Rapid City, where Rosie maintained her nosy optimism, fervently believing — despite overwhelming odds to the contrary — that there was a pheasant or grouse waiting to be flushed around the next bend.

Never a slacker, she stayed blue-collared busy, whether snuffling her way through a Lyman County sorghum field or — in her younger days, at least — frantically chasing butterflies and even bird shadows back and forth across the backyard grass.

She was unremittingly upbeat and never failed to lift my spirits, even at the lowest of times.

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Then came the decline, slow at first, much faster near the end. It was nothing out of the ordinary: an old dog with a bunch of old-dog ailments that finally reached her time.

And an old-dog lover who needed some help in admitting it.

 

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South Dakota

SD resource for deaf and hard of hearing community

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SD resource for deaf and hard of hearing community


SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — For people who are deaf or hard of hearing, it may be difficult to know where to find resources that can help.

Bir Gurung was just 14 years old when he came to America.

“I didn’t know American Sign Language when I moved here, and I didn’t know how my language in Nepali sign language would translate as well as English,” Deaf, Bir Gurung said.

It wasn’t until he found SD DROP that his life changed, and he was able to learn American Sign Language, also known as ASL.

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“I thought it was crucial to do that if you’re going to be in America. I didn’t want this communication breakdown that I’ve experienced for so long. And so I wanted to make sure that I knew what was going on. And now that I know the language, that’s crucial and I got that through them,” Gurung said.

South Dakota Deaf Resources and Outreach Programs, also known as SD DROP, used to be known as Communication Service for the Deaf.

“We serve deaf and hard of hearing individuals from birth, wherever. It’s primarily like social work, independent living, peer support. We work in groups or one on one. We work under the state’s Department of Human Services. We’re funded through them. And then we run the programs for them, primarily the communication assistance,” co-director of SD DROP, Lance Sigdestad said.

“We have deaf mentoring where we’ll bring in a mentor to help teach a family sign language. They have a new baby who has been diagnosed as deaf. And so we can come in and start teaching that family right away so that they can start reading stories to their baby in sign. So it’s all through the life span,” co-director of SD DROP, Katie Peterson said.

SD DROP helps people like Gurung in a variety of different ways.

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“Our communication assistance program provides anything from maybe a deaf person will come in with a letter they don’t quite understand all the jargon of, and so we can just sort of explain that or advocacy we call in and help them get an interpreter for an appointment. It can really be so many different things,” Peterson said.

The nonprofit’s work reaches beyond just the deaf community.

“We also do work with individuals who have really any communication barrier and the good example, people with Down’s syndrome or speech delays, it’s just a way for them to learn, sign and open up more opportunities for communication,” Sigdestad said.

“We work with people who are hard of hearing and just have maybe don’t hear as well as they’d like to on the telephone. So we may not be talking about sign language for them, but giving them tools like the idea that you can pull out your phone and open an app and it will caption everything that somebody’s saying or over the phone,” Peterson said.

Helping people in the deaf community have access to resources that weren’t always there.

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“I have the knowledge to share with them and be ready to empower that next generation. So that’s because I had that experience of not having it. I want to make sure that the next generation has that. So that’s what drives me to do what I do,” Sigdestad said.

“It’s a necessity to help me learn and now they’ve helped me find a job. They’ve helped me be able to go and get a car and learn how to drive and become a citizen, which that is something that’s very important to me,” Gurung said.

Click here to learn more about SD DROP’s resources and how they can help you.



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South Dakota

Top SD environmental regulator says Biden-era law created ‘water renaissance’ in state • South Dakota Searchlight

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Top SD environmental regulator says Biden-era law created ‘water renaissance’ in state • South Dakota Searchlight


Though he didn’t credit the Biden administration by name, South Dakota’s top environmental official recently praised one of the administration’s laws for spurring a “water renaissance that was overdue” in the state.

Hunter Roberts leads South Dakota’s Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Its responsibilities include the regulation of drinking water and wastewater systems.

The office awarded $689 million to 200 water-related projects across the state during the last several years, Roberts told a legislative committee last week at the Capitol in Pierre. The money came from the American Rescue Plan Act, known by the acronym “ARPA.”

“It created an opportunity to make that investment and, I think, move our state forward long-term when we look at water-wastewater infrastructure, which is critical,” Roberts said. “If we don’t have safe, clean drinking water, what else do we have?”

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Congress passed the ARPA legislation in 2021. Then-President Joe Biden signed it into law that March. It included a total of $1.9 trillion in funding to stimulate the national economy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If we don’t have safe, clean drinking water, what else do we have?

– Hunter Roberts, secretary of the South Dakota Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources

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South Dakota’s share was about $1 billion. Besides water and wastewater infrastructure, the money funded broadband internet expansion, infrastructure for housing, telemedicine initiatives, the construction of a new state public health lab, and more.

Roberts’ department used the water and wastewater money to make grants for local projects. The grants helped to pay for infrastructure such as storage reservoirs, tanks, water pipes, treatment plants, wells, pump stations, filtration systems and sewer lines.

Some local water systems had been diligent about upgrading and modernizing before the ARPA funds became available, Roberts said, but for the others, “those additional funds kind of spurred our utilities to get off their keister and make those investments that they maybe hadn’t made in 20 to 30 years.”

At another point in his presentation to the legislative committee — which included a broad overview of departmental activities — Roberts said he was excited about the end of the Biden administration. Roberts was appointed to his job in 2019 by then-Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican who’s since become President Donald Trump’s secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

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Roberts said the Biden administration enacted “overly broad, overreaching, unfounded” laws and regulations.

“It seemed like there was a lot of regulatory overreach coming from Washington, D.C., pushed down to the regions and the states that we didn’t like,” Roberts said.

He also acknowledged that Trump’s zeal for imposing tariffs could negatively impact international trade and industries that depend on it, including agriculture.

“That remains to be seen how that all works through the system, but it’s certainly something we’re watching closely,” Roberts said.

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SD Legislature won't quit trying to make it harder to change the constitution • South Dakota Searchlight

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SD Legislature won't quit trying to make it harder to change the constitution • South Dakota Searchlight


South Dakota voters aren’t particularly fond of ballot measures that seek to change the state constitution. They’re even less enamored of attempts to mess with the way that their constitution can be changed. That history of failure doesn’t keep legislators from trying.

The latest attempt is House Joint Resolution 5003 sponsored by Rep. John Hughes, a Sioux Falls Republican. Currently, constitutional amendments placed on the general election ballot are passed with 50% of the vote plus one. Hughes seeks to raise that benchmark to 60% of the vote.

The resolution has passed its first two hurdles, getting approval from the House State Affairs Committee on an 11-2 vote and passing the full House on a vote of 61-5.

According to Hughes, because South Dakota has a 50% plus one threshold, “We are a target for being used as a laboratory for the emergence of new values and new ideas that many, many, many South Dakotans do not share.”

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Lawmakers consider higher bar for constitutional amendments and a trigger to end Medicaid expansion

Often during the testimony about HJR 5003, there were complaints about the millions of dollars dumped into South Dakota elections by out-of-state interests. It sounds naive to think that big-money interests would stay away from South Dakota elections if the threshold for passing a constitutional amendment were raised to 60% of the vote.

Many of South Dakota’s current crop of legislators weren’t around in 2017 when their brethren in the Legislature made quick work of dismantling Initiated Measure 22, an anti-corruption bill endorsed with 51% of the vote. IM 22 may have been as unworkable as it was unconstitutional, but instead of letting the courts decide on its demise, lawmakers acted fast to do the job themselves.

Their eagerness to enact some parts of the initiated measure and ignore other parts led some people — particularly those people who are interested in getting their ideas on the ballot — to believe that the Legislature was circumventing the will of the people. The Legislature’s fast action on an initiated measure made constitutional amendments, which can’t be messed with by lawmakers once the voters approve, all the more compelling for people who want to raise issues that the Legislature won’t tackle.

Resolutions like the one Hughes is backing don’t have a good track record with voters. In 2018, the mysteriously named Amendment X sought to raise the approval threshold on constitutional amendments to 55%. It garnered only 46% of the vote. In 2022, Amendment C sought to raise the requirement to three-fifths of the vote if the amendment in question required an increase in taxes or fees or the appropriation of $10 million over five fiscal years. Voters didn’t like that one either, with 67% of them voting against it.

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Often during the discussion about HJR 5003, Hughes and the committee members asserted that voters are suffering from “ballot fatigue.” Their suffering will only get worse in 2026 when, besides ballot issues, voters will be faced with choices for governor, U.S. representative, state constitutional offices and the Legislature. The “ballot fatigue” argument leads to the realization that lawmakers are irony-impaired.

Prior to voting to put HJR 5003 on the ballot, members of the committee approved HJR 5001, a constitutional amendment that would ease South Dakota’s escape from paying for expanded Medicaid. There’s also a joint resolution in the Senate seeking to put yet another constitutional amendment of the ballot. If lawmakers themselves weren’t so eager to change the constitution, South Dakota’s ballots would be shorter.

In 2024, two of the constitutional amendments originated with lawmakers — a work requirement for Medicaid and a neutering of the language used in the constitution to get ride of male pronouns. The language amendment failed. Voters approved of the Medicaid work requirement, but if Hughes’ effort was in effect, it would have failed since it got only 56% of the vote.

South Dakota finds itself at a veritable Bermuda Triangle of election factors that attract out-of-state influence. It’s a state where it’s relatively easy to get on the ballot, media costs are cheap by national standards and campaign finance laws are hard to enact ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that political spending is a form of free speech.

In the end, there’s not much that the Legislature can do to keep away out-of-state interests and their fat wallets. But lawmakers can help out voters by curbing their baser instinct to continually use their power to put even more constitutional amendments on the ballot.

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