Mayor of Denver, Michael Hancock, has been pressuring members of the Occupy Denver movement to pick a leader, “to deal with City and State officials.” So the protesters, in the most benign shove-it gesture imaginable, elected a three-and-a-half-year-old border collie. Named Shelby.

Says filmmaker and Shelby’s bodyguard, Peter Jentsch:

She spent a few weeks getting to know everybody here, so when [protest organizer, Al Nesby] nominated her, everybody knew who she was and liked her. She’s the youngest leader of a revolution in history and the first of any occupation so far, but she’s smart, so people know she won’t make any situations. We just have to make sure she doesn’t get arrested.

A couple of blogs talking about this are seeing the election as a wider comment on human corporations and whatnot, which is silly – it’s a joke. It happens to be a pretty funny one, which preserves the leaderless nature of the OWS campaign as a whole, but please let’s not get all art school and call the border collie an iconoclast.

Especially nice is the fact that protesters have already officially requested that Shelby have a meeting with Colorado’s Governor, John Hickenlooper.

[Source: Westword]