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Sunday, June 26, 2011

The Beagle and the Tale of the Invisible Dirt

I love my beagle.  She is the cutest thing.  Her body is mostly black with a little brown and white thrown in on her sides and legs.  The very tippy tip of her tail is white and her head is mostly brown with a white stripe between her eyes.  Since it's been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, here:
See, she's adorable.  She was young here, just a puppy so she's a little whiter around the muzzle now but you get the drift.

Ever since the stork dropped her off she has this weird thing she does sometimes.  When she is given a treat she will walk around and look for a spot to hide it.  But, the entire time she is "hiding" it she whines so it's not like she's being stealthy and no one knows where she is.  She emits her own little tracking signal. 


Then, once she has found a good spot, she will so very gently place the treat there.  Now, the spot she picks is usually the corner of a room, or where the sofa cushion meets the back or edge of the sofa, or recliner cushion, she's not picky about furniture.  Then she will give it a teeny poke with her nose to tuck it in so very sweetly like a little night-night kiss.

Then she backs up a bit, flattens the side of her face to either the carpet, sofa or chair cushion, and then proceeds to scoot the side of her face along whatever surface towards the treat.  She gets to the treat, stops and starts the whole process over from another angle.

For awhile, I was baffled by this behavior.  I knew that in her beagle mind, she was fulfilling some kind of purpose but I just didn't know what.  Then at some point my human mind made a connection.  I realized that she must've been burying the treat.  So all the shoving and rubbing and scooting must've been her pushing invisible dirt over her most prized possession du jour. 

There are times when she catches me watching her during this procedure and since her cover has been blown, she sighs and grabs the little morsel to have a go at it elsewhere, away from my nosy peepers.  You know though, after all the work she puts into shooshing whatever it is that she's shooshing over her treat, she never, ever, unburies it.  What is up with that?

Dogs, you gotta love 'em.

1 comment:

  1. Bear says that that is a perfectly acceptable manner of protecting a treat and sends her a big doggie kiss.

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