As we populate our website with popular posts from Facebook, we’d be remiss in not reprising this one.
Yes, what you see here are socks on a fence. What makes these socks interesting is that a dog put them there, and she does so frequently.
“Shylo” is a Beagle who hangs “her” socks whenever her neighbor, a retired army office, plays his bugle. Why socks? Why does a bugle trigger this behavior?
In the fascinating book by Vicki Mathison, “Dog Works: The Meaning and Magic of Canine Construction,” the author shares the obscure writings she found of a retired English huntsman. It seems that after a hunt while adults were replenishing their vigor with hip flasks of whiskey, children would play a traditional game, “Pin the Tail on the Child,” which required each child to hang an article of their clothing – usually a sock – on a fence. At the sound of the hunt horn, their chosen hound was sent to retrieve their piece of clothing. The child whose hound was first to return with the correct item won the game and which entitled the child to wear the fox’s tail pinned to his or her jacket.
It get weirder. Beagles were traditionally used in hunting hares, not foxes, but research into “Shylo’s” ancestry revealed that her predecessors came from a kennel where a small pack of Beagles accompanied hounds on fox hunts, not hunts for rabbits, an obvious break with tradition.
Who can say whether genetic memory (if such a thing exists) explains “Shylo’s” behavior, but while building her “sculptures,” “Shylo” clearly cocks her head to a side as though listening to the bugle. Have we even begun to scratch the surface of what makes our breeds tick?