Animal Insting

Here are a few more interesting things in our neighborhood that I did not get to tell you about before.  These pictures were all taken when the weather was still nice, but now that it's cold, we don't much like to go walking anymore.  Well, I don't like to go walking.  My brothers will walk even when it's cold and wet outside.  This is because they don't have the good sense that I do.  Even Mom refuses to walk if it's icy out or if it's below 20 degrees, so she has reasonably good sense, too.

But anyway, here's some stuff we sometimes see when we are walking.  First of all is the Pig House.  These people have a giant, life-sized statue of a pig on their porch.  We don't know why they have this.  Maybe they grew up on a farm and now they miss living there.  The first time Mel saw this pig, he started barking at it because he thought it was real, and it scared him.  But now he doesn't pay any attention to it.

Here are some juniper berries that Mom took a picture of.  She thinks they are pretty, but I'm not much interested in them because they aren't anything I would ever want to eat.

And here's a house where a taxicab lives.  We think the man who drives it must work at night because the cab is usually there in the mornings when we walk by.

Can you see the little cairn terrier in this photo?  We often see him out running around the neighborhood.  We know where he lives, but we don't know what his name is.  Sometimes he gets tethered in his front yard, but other times his people just let him out to run around for a while.  One time, this terrier came up to Gabe and me when we were walking with Mom, and the dog's dad was out in front of his house, about three houses away from where we were.  The dad started calling him to come home, but the terrier just ignored him, of course.

So Mom let Gabe go right up to the terrier because she knew what Gabe would do, and she wanted to make a point to the terrier's dad.  Sure enough, Gabe sniffed the terrier and then jumped on him and clamped his teeth on the back of the terrier's neck, which in dog-speak means "I am the boss of you!"  The terrier rolled over on his back and started yelping like Gabe was killing him, which Gabe was not.  And meanwhile, the terrier's dad was calling him to come, and the terrier went running home.

Then Mom was waiting for the terrier's dad to apologize for letting his dog run loose in the neighborhood, but all he did was look angry.  Maybe he was waiting for Mom to apologize for letting Gabe attack this man's off-leash dog, but Mom didn't see any reason to apologize.  We think the man never got the point that his dog might be in danger because he was running around loose, but the dog got the point.  We know this because he has never come close to us again!