Animal Actions

So I'm driving to work, through a mostly residential area with little plot yards for each brick house. There is, however, one of the original houses complete with pigs, goats and a very muddy yard. As I'm coming to it, I notice an animal just on what would be a sidewalk, if we had one. It's a goat, out of the fence, about to cross the road. So I honk. Guess what? goats can jump vertically which it did. It barely landed back on its feet and it started running. Fore legs out straight. Who knew they could run like that?

So I'm thinking about the running goat, get by the hellatious S curve with no guardrails but a good drop on each side, and I'm coming up on a family compound on both sides of the road. At least, I think they're family. I draw this conclusion from farm animals that seem to wander back and forth across the road between the houses.

Today, I get the answer to the perpetual question, "Why does the chicken cross the road?" Right in front of me, I've got a flock of chickens ambling across the road. On the side that they are ambling towards is the rooster, who standing and watching the procession. He lets out a god-awful sound and now the chickens run. Chickens put their heads down low and stick their asses out for speed. (Speed is relative.) They are now hellbent on getting to the other side. So the answer to the question is they cross the road because the rooster was yelling at them to get to the other side.

I own a messenger dog. He knows it's his duty to pass on the message that the dog down the road within earshot is delivering. So every evening, he's like a yo-yo, in and out of the house, listening for the message. There are times I barely have the back door opened and he's pouncing up and forward as he howls. He gets himself in quite a tizzy sometimes so it must be a hell of a message. After those messages where he's been howling for 20 minutes or more, he'll come back in and collapse for an hour. A lot of energy expended... a huge responsibility to keep the message going. Somebody's got to pass the messages along... kind of like smoke signals.