What animal should represent Columbus? (sorry, swamp rabbit’s taken)

Here’s a question for you: Which animal would best represent Columbus?

And could it possibly be as cool as the swamp rabbit?

I recently returned from the intercity trip to Greenville, S.C., where most attendees came away impressed by the city’s scenic waterfall, business accelerator programs and elementary engineering school. Some even got big ideas like turning the Ralston back into a luxury hotel or adding condos and retail to Golden Park and luring a minor league baseball team back to town.

My takeaway? Greenville beat us to the swamp rabbit.

Dagnabbit.

You may remember that the swamp rabbit — or for you Latin scholars, Sylvilagus aquaticus — is the creature that tried to attack President Jimmy Carter in 1979 while he was fishing on his farm pond.

Carter deftly used his paddle to shoo away the swamp rabbit, and the incident became, according to no less an authority than Dave Barry, the single most memorable event of the Carter presidency.

Nobody forgets a swamp rabbit.

Maybe that’s why Greenville chose to name its 21-mile biking and hiking trail the Swamp Rabbit Trail.

Well, actually, it’s the Greenville Health System Swamp Rabbit Trail, but that first part is easy to forget.

In addition to landing a corporate partner, the Greenville County Recreation Department made a lot of smart moves while developing the trail, including teaming with restaurants and gas stations to share bathrooms and partnering with churches to share parking lots.

But choosing the swamp rabbit as the face of the project was sheer brilliance. Talk about brand recognition. And now there’s a Swamp Rabbit Café and a Swamp Rabbit Inn.

Oh, and the local minor league hockey team is now called – you guessed it! – the Greenville Swamp Rabbits.

Meanwhile, the beautiful rails to trails project in Columbus is called…

Um, it’s called…

Even Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, who has a mind like a steel trap, was struggling to remember the name while talking about the trail during the trip.

“Fall Line Trail,” someone suggested helpfully.

“Fall Line Trace,” somebody said, getting it right.

But did the city get it right when we named it?

The beautiful thing about choosing the swamp rabbit was that somebody in the room probably thought it was goofy and stupid, and somebody with some clout had to validate the idea.

You know, sort of like the Aflac duck. Can you imagine pitching that idea to a bunch of guys in suits? It was a huge risk but, man, did it pay off.

OK, so the swamp rabbit wasn’t a huge risk. You name your trail something dumb and people with bikes will still go ride on it. But other people aren’t getting excited about it.

You’ve got to pick the right animal.

If we were going to name our bike trails – or zip lines or swinging bridges or disc golf courses or whatever we can cook up – after a cool animal, what would it be?

Of course, I called upon none other than Tim Chitwood, our resident humorist/ naturalist/ cynic.

Of course, he was an endless fount of ideas. Here are just a handful of them, with the word “trail” tacked on to them for the sake of practical application:

Gray Squirrel Trail.

Feral Cat Trail.

Cotton Rat Trail.

Rat Snake Trail.

Wild Hog Trail.

Cockroach Trail.

He also threw out some non-zoological options: Skeeter, Ranger, Twinkie, Linthead, Acorn, Pecan, Growler and Grits.

What do you think?

This story was originally published September 30, 2016 at 8:20 PM with the headline "What animal should represent Columbus? (sorry, swamp rabbit’s taken)."