Why would a dog gather vibrant orange and red leaves and arrange them into separate mounds?

Meet “Ochre,” a Vizsla who’s been doing this for several years. Why she does it eludes her baffled owners, as does why she does it only when the leaves have turned color. Green foliage bores her.

Using a technique of carrying, scraping, kicking and pushing, she organizes her piles in a row. After contemplating her work for a moment, Ochre collects more leaves and starts a new row.

Both a canine heritage researcher and an animal telepathic spiritualist who have visited Ochre believe that colors are supremely important to her, although science tells us that color visualization is quite different for dogs. The researcher takes his explanation a bit further by suggesting that as a Vizsla, Ochre is tapping into her sporting dog ancestry when pheasants were piled after a shoot much the same way Ochre organizes her leaves.

Who can say.

Ochre’s owners are orchardists, and the dog has always been fond of picking off orchard heads to distribute them neatly around the garden. Our favorite part of her story, however, has to do with Ochre’s best friend, “Cora,” a German Pointer. Two days after “Cora” passed away, three gleaming tulip heads were found lying on Cora’s gravesite. To this day, no one has ever claimed putting the tulips there. One does wonders.

Ochre’s story is one of many puzzling anecdotes about similar dog behavior from the fascinating book by Vicki Mathison, “Dog Works: The Meaning and Magic of Canine Constructions,”  Some have explained such unexplainable behavior as having scientific roots, while others suggest a spiritual link between a dog’s mind and its owner’s. We’ll be sharing more of these dogs in the future and thought Ochre’s ritual was a good place to start.