This picture is from yesterday, but the scene was more or less the same this morning:
A rabbit had hopped into our yard, to eat the spilled seed under the bird feeder (or something over there-- it's like a Disney movie sometimes, with all manner of happy little woodland creatures), so we let the dog out. She spotted the bunny, and sloooooowly crept across the patio toward it, moving very quietly so as not to disturb her prey.
Eventualy, some invisible-to-humans line was crossed, and the rabbit took off for the back part of the yard, with Her Majesty in hot pursuit. There are a number of gaps in the fence, and I assumed it made it into the neighbor's yard, an assumption backed up by the fact that the dog was just sitting and staring through the fence. So I went upstairs...
A few minutes later, Kate yelled up the stairs, "She killed it!"
"What?" I said.
"There's a dead rabbit on the patio!"
And, indeed, there was a dead rabbit on the patio. And one extremely proud dog in the kitchen. And we thought we were being sarcastic when we called her a mighty hunter...
I have no idea how she got it, but she apparently got one of the many local bunnies. At least, it was very recently dead-- I didn't conduct a detailed forensic investigation, or anything, but my tentative hypothesis that one died of natural causes, and she just found the body was not borne out. It didn't appear to be made of cheese, either, though it must've had a brain made of cheese to get caught like that.
She's now all confused, because she had a bunny, and left it right here, but now it's gone... But, at the same time, she's very smug, because she caught a bunny.
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Her reaction initially led me to think that maybe it had just dropped dead at her feet. When I opened the door to call her inside, she was standing quite calmly on the patio, enough so that I only noticed the rabbit at her feet when I happened to glance down. And she came right inside when I called her.
She didn't try and take it inside, either. I'd say this shows that she didn't think of it as food, but she routinely tries to take toys outside, so probably what this means is that it was inconvenient for her to do so. (You'd know that better than I.)
"A rabbit had hopped into our yard,...so we let the dog out...She killed it!"
shorter version: You killed it.
You feeling proud and smug about that?
shorter version: You killed it.
You feeling proud and smug about that?
Not especially. However, I'm not about to feel guilty about it, either.
She's a dog, with millions of years of evolution telling her to chase and kill small moving things. It's what she does, and I see nothing wrong with letting her act on her instincts now and again.
And, really, given the number of rabbits and squirrels in our neighborhood, if we tried to keep her inside to spare the happy fuzzy woodland critters, we'd need to train her to use a litter box.
Also, as can be clearly seen in the picture, the rabbit was a foot away from a fence which it could hop through and the dog couldn't. If the yard was completely fenced in, no escape routes, I wouldn't have let the dog out when I saw the rabbit.
Since I had absolutely no reason to think she would or could catch *anything*, I regarded it as a chance for her to get some exercise and excitement.
That bunny looks like a garden variety cotton tail. If Emmy wanted to go 'big time' she'd have to nail a jack rabbit. They're not altogether very smart, but Oh! do they have the moves and the speed to go with it. No dog I know of can keep up with their rapid zig-zag patterns. The notion of a rabbit dying of sheer fright is not at all far fetched. I believe that's one of the hazards for kids who keep pet bunnies.
Reminds me of a time when our Great Danes in the back yard caught the neighbor's parakeet. We kept hearing the neighbor call, "Budgie! Budgie!" One of the Danes had this funny set to his jaw. Spouse walked over and extracted a fully intact bird - only it's tail feathers protruded beyond the dog's jowls. He handed the bird back over the fence to the neighbor. Budgie was thoroughly slobbered but appeared otherwise fine. Don't know if the Dane snatched it out of the air, or caught it on the ground.
As a very long time occasionally militant vegan, I have no problem whatsoever with dogs going after rabbits, squirrels and other intruders. The little critters have also had millions of years of evolution in evasive tactics. It's a fair fight. Just think of it as evolution in action. Having lost gardens to deer and gophers, and routinely escorted entire raccoon families out of the pantry, they've lost any cuteness factor in my sympathies.
Now you've done it Chad. Next week at the conference the commentators will be talking about you and your dog activities and not the physics! You'll be the Micheal Vick of DAMOP:-)
Oh wait, we don't have commentators and analysts.......Never mind.
Cold atoms and entanglement anyone????