Mixed Greens

Barley, a dog, sniffs about in a thicket of bushy plants consisting of at least five distinct species, all so densely interwoven that anything beneath them is wholly concealed.

I’m very sensitive about eye stuff. Nothing in a film makes me squirm like someone’s eye getting messed with, and I go to great lengths to keep my own eyes shielded from harm. This makes Barley’s face-first approach the world all the most remarkable to me. It’s clear to me that her eyes are simply made of sterner stuff than mine. Sure, she’s got beefy eyelids to protect herself, and she can always proceed by smell alone if her eyes need to stay closed, but she still brushes the wet surface of her eyeballs against stuff just about every day as she goes about her routine, and never seems even a little bothered by it. Faced with this sort of thick, interlocking foliage, she’ll just put her whole face in and root around in a way I certainly couldn’t get away with unless I used eye protection. It makes me wonder to what extent this is something dogs simply learn to put up with, as well as how much of it is simply that dogs are built different.