Where the Deer and the Antelope ... and the Poodles ... Play

Q.t.𝞹, my newish miniature poodle, surprised me with her behavior on this high altitude sagebrush/grass/aspen land near Vernal, UT. Perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise.

She gamboled across the field literally by leaps and bounds. It was delightful to watch. The sagebrush was just the right height, and mixed with green grass so as to fit the stature of a 20 pound miniature poodle.

Why was she going crazy? She had spend the first 4+ years of her life living in a hot urban hellhole (Phoenix), including some homeless street life, getting knocked up by a husky, having a litter of 'hoodles,' going to (good) second owners, and then finally to me.

And now she was running on soil and green grass instead of hot pavement or rubble. That must feel great to a dog; after all, they are pawed/padded creatures, not hooved creatures. She chased white-tailed deer. I had brushed her the night before and had not yet reinstalled her collar, so she ran free and naked, a perfect little child of Nature. 

Her experience was redolent of what Bertrand Russell once said, in "Conquest of Happiness":

Whatever we may wish to think, we are creatures of Earth; our life is part of the life of the Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do...

I have seen a boy of two years old, who had been kept in London, taken out for the first time to walk in green country. The season was winter, and everything was wet and muddy. To the adult eye there was nothing to cause delight, but in the boy there sprang up a strange ecstasy; he kneeled in the wet ground and put his face in the grass, and gave utterance to half-articulate cries of delight. The joy that he was experiencing was primitive, simple and massive.  

First photo with new phone on my new ATT service.