If you like working dogs (and who doesn’t?!) and you still send items by mail, you’ll love the set of four working-dog stamps unleashed by the US Postal Service today. The stamps depict a guide dog, a therapy dog, a military dog (a tracking dog), and a search dog.
Unfortunately these aren’t the right denominations for a typical letter, but if you have anything a bit bigger, they’ll do the trick. They almost make me want to send big fat letters to my friends. They’re too good for my big fat bills, though.
Artist John M. Thompson based the stamps on photographs he composed, and painted them in acrylics, according to the Baltimore Sun (the USPS Store site has been down for hours this morning so I can’t get it straight from the source; it may be up by the time you read this. You can order the stamps directly from there if you want to avoid lines.)
Military working dog groups have been pushing for a standard-letter-priced stamp honoring military working dogs for more than a decade now. They’re glad that the dogs have a nod in this set of stamps, but they are still pushing for a “forever” stamp or set of stamps devoted to these canine heroes. If you want to help this endeavor, head to the US War Dogs Association stamp petition page and click the link. (As with the postal stamp site, this morning the petition site isn’t working, but with luck it should be fixed soon.)
Dogsters, will you be buying these stamps? What do you think of them? Will you be coating your postal packages with them for a while? I’m going to get a few sets of these once the postal link is going again. Even though it may be a long time before I have a reason to use them, I’d like them handy when I need them. They’ll join my Owney dog stamps in my top desk drawer.
