Blue is the Color of my True Dog's Hair

Lisa: Oh my goodness what a color for a dog! It's neat because I heard on the news once that blue is America's favorite color. How appropriate, then, for a dog to be blue! I'm not really sure how the color blue is made. Also I heard (not on the news) that blue eyes are blue because they lack pigment like the sky. Maybe that is how this dog got his color. It's a mutation! Funny how a mutation can be so cool, huh? I think my favorite part of this dog is that his tongue is blue, I wonder if when he licks you there's blue!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jesse: Artists in Holland love their country's kleur honden, because the dogs' color changes corresponding to the overall state of their emotions, which sets up a great motif system for really deeply suggestive painting as well as a fun event where passels of the dogs are taught to run together to form a tremendous, wriggling Dutch flag all the way down the Kalverstraat. No, the whole thing is not so simple as a mood ring where a dog will magically change color before your eyes and don't get the idea that because this dog is blue it means that he's sad; nature doesn't conform to our pathetic rules regarding color theory.

Scientists have studied this for years and confirmed that in this case blue is actually suited more to an overall feeling of near-contentedness, like the one you get when you're all sprawled out on the hammock after a nice meal and everything is perfect until you remember that if you're not dead fifty years from now you'll be entirely hideous and cranky. Dogs feel this way a lot because they'll be perfectly and completely happy until they realize that they need to eat a shoe. As far as other colors go, green is the stinging disappointment/insufficiency feeling of a botched first date. Yellow is the "christmas feeling" (you know what I mean). Red is like finding money in your jacket.

So you can see why people love these things. Dutch housewives display them like flowers in the spring and the government gets involved by posting a battalion of trained hounds on the roof of the capital building to communicate the feelings of the state on current international affairs.