Got No Bones To Pick With You

Barley, a dog, is completely oblivious to a skeleton sitting in a tree swing.

An amusing discovery I’ve made this Spooky Season is that Barley categorically does not recognize skeletons as person-like. Sure, if they moved she would probably be startled, but she’s often fooled by silhouettes, at least momentarily. Stuff a shirt and some jeans with straw to make a scarecrow and she’ll at least check it out. So such luck for the xylophone crew: She treat skeletal yard decorations with a disinterest that borders on blindness. As such, this photo was particularly difficult to get. She kept just walking past the skeleton, back and forth, and even when I got her to stand still in front of the thing, she was convinced that surely I was trying to draw her attention toward something else.