Some towns have become tourist hotspots, if only for one day a year, because of their names. On Valentine's Day the post offices at Loving, New Mexico and Valentine, Nebraska do a larger volume of business than usual with folks wanting their love letters postmarked from those booming metropoli.

I was in a place in the Bahamas once called Hell, whose solitary building is a small post office the size of a two-hole outhouse that existed only for tourists to send postcards from Hell. Among my many money-making schemes was that I once wanted to commercialize the town of Dull Center, Wyoming, to snare passing tourists who wanted to liven up their boring lives.

Yes, let me assure you there is such a place, although you probably won't find it on any map. The sole resident of Dull Center is Susie, a friend who assures me the town was not named after her exciting lifestyle. Although she admits that things were pretty dull in Dull Center this summer compared to last. Last June Susie hosted recreational shooters to shoot AT prairie dogs who were gradually taking over her ranch. Each hunter fired from 150-600 rounds per day and they still didn't make a dent in the prairie dog population. Other than a few holes in water troughs, the venture paid well and travel agents were booking hunters for this year.

For those of you unfamiliar with prairie dogs, or prairie rats as I prefer to call them, they are furry trespassers who tunnel under rangeland, devour vegetation like a herd of Mexican goats and multiply faster than Democrats in a Florida election. Prairie dogs are nature's land developers, and when they're done their towns look a lot like Detroit and LA, only with more culture. Livestock snap their legs by stepping in their holes and hence they are not-so-lovably referred to as sod poodles, Pariahs of the Prairie and other names not suitable for print in this family publication.

Besides gun toting CEO's who want to take out their frustrations by shooting something, many strategies have been used to keep the little fur-balls in check. Our government used to use gas and fumigants, but others have come up with more ingenious forms of prairie dog control. One man sucks them up alive with a vacuum truck. Since the prairie rats are traveling at 40 miles per hour when they hit the holding tank, he lined it with foam rubber so the dogs wouldn't be dented. He then sells the overgrown rats to Japan. I don't know if they keep them as pets or eat them, but I figure anyone who would eat sushi would consider prairie rat a delicacy. Another enterprising fellow forces the rats out of their holes with soapy water, fluffs up their hair, gives them a saline eyewash and relocates them. Although I don't know anyone other than Ted Turner dumb enough to willingly encourage the little devils. One town staged a "Blastathon" and charged patrons a dollar a dog with the proceeds going to charity.

I thought perhaps that Dull Center's exciting and cosmopolitan lifestyle combined with exotic prairie rat hunting expeditions might finally put Dull Center on the map. But it was not meant to be. You see, prairie rats carry the bubonic plague in their flea-bitten fur, and due to an overpopulation on Susie's ranch the entire town was wiped out. Dog gone it, just when she thought she had found a way to make ranching pay.

Still, there's hope. Environmeddlers and animal rightists have come up with the best way yet to lessen the number of the devil dogs. The National Wildlife Federation petitioned our government to have the dogs declared a threatened species, despite the fact that in the last 30 years the dogs have gone from occupying 10,000 acres of North Dakota to 30,000! The greenies figure by 2003 they'll get the listing and then it will be illegal to harass or harm a prairie rat.

It's been proven time and again that the best way to reduce the number of any species is to declare it threatened or endangered. Their numbers are drastically reduced with one bureaucrat's flick of the pen.