Remarkable Mimicry

Barley, a dog, is photographed at a pier, next to a concrete bollard that has been painted to look like a giant pacific octopus.

Barley was genuinely confused when we stopped to take this photo. “Why are we stopping?” she seemed to ask, looking around for what could possibly be a point of interest. Given that she doesn’t even find television interesting, it should come as no surprise that she has never once expressed even a shred of interest in any painted mural or similarly representative artwork. These, so far as she is concerned, are just another part of the world’s texture that is irrelevant to her concerns. Her colorblindness no doubt plays a role, but a really critical detail, I think, is depth perception. She has been fooled by statues before. It’s as through, if she perceives that some image is flat as she moves (because its subject shows no parallax relative to its background), it is immediately disregarded. So these creeping tentacles mean nothing to her, nor do these looming eyes.

As an aside, this happens to be the 700th post on this blog, which is hard to wrap my mind around. Less than a year left before we hit our fourth digit!