Doing Grand

Nuclear Steam – Photo: L. Weikel

While I didn’t take a photo of her this evening, I want to confirm that Princess is doing just grand. It was getting pretty dark when we met up with her this evening, in fact I took the above photo about one minute after treating Princess to two peanut butter baked dog treats. Hey, don’t give me a hard time. Liddle and Middle chose to stay in their pen and didn’t come out to say hello to us. So yeah…I spoiled Princess.

Lately, we’ve been noticing that Princess doesn’t seem to recognize me when I wear my heavier winter coat. That coat is blue. But every time I wear my yellow jacket, she runs out to greet me.

I should clarify: there are times when I occasionally want to sneak past Princess’s field undetected. Usually it’s because I’ve forgotten the larger baked pup treats I like to share with her. The teeny tiny training morsels we give to Brutus and Pacha and almost always have in our pockets, while she definitely seems to snarf them up enthusiastically, seem to barely register with her. Consequently, I like to try to skip the whole situation when I happen to forget the Princess treats (as we’ve come to calling them).

How to Trick a Pig

First of all, I’ve discovered that if I want to remain undetected, I cannot be having a discussion when approaching her field. Nor can I be listening to a podcast without my earpods. If she hears voices approaching, she knows she could be looking at a potential treat dispenser, so she tears in our general direction, covering ground across the field like a heat-seeking missile.

In order to sneak past pigs, then, your number one lesson is to be silent.

The next strategy effective strategy, apparently, is to wear a blue coat. This has been discovered quite by accident, but it does appear to be pretty reliable (as long as we remain quiet). Whenever I wear my heaviest winter coat, she doesn’t seem to see me – or at least it’s been much easier to escape her attention.

But when I wear my yellow jacket? She notices me. As soon as she catches sight of us, she sprints across the field and escorts me, practically prancing, along the fence line to the place where I always give her treats.

The second way to sneak up on a pig: wear blue.

Are Pigs Colorblind?

I don’t know if pigs are color blind. It sounds like they aren’t entirely color-deprived (as far as their eyesight goes.) But their sight may definitely be less rich than ours.

Lucky for me, tonight she caught sight of me just as I started climbing the hill toward her pen. Her enthusiastic greeting was sweet and always makes me smile. (Brutus enjoys touching noses with her each and every time we give her treats. Pacha, meanwhile, is a little too high strung around Princess. She sort of lunges at her and we don’t want Princess to lash out because she’s taken by surprise at Pacha’s furtive movements.)

I had plenty of treats with me today, so there was no need for us to go into stealth mode. Good thing, too. I was wearing my yellow jacket.