My Pawprints

My Pawtograph

The image above is my classic pawtograph. It is of my right front foot (notice that my little toe is on the outside not on the inside like on humans). Of course, a real pawprint doesn’t look quite like that. Really they are messy and indistinct and I normally smudge the front ones up with the back ones when I walk over them.

A front pawprint

It is also hard to find mud that has just the right consistency to make a nice impression of my foot. Above is an example my owner captured after following me around for months with a camera. (Actually, she is always following me with a camera so make that years.) That is my left front paw.

Just this week, my owner caught a break in her relentless search for my pawprints when I walked across the back porch with super muddy paws. (I also had a super muddy body but there’s no reason to go into that.) She finally got an image of my back pawprint.

My left hind pawprint

She outlined it in red to try to differentiate it from all the speckles of mud that I have no idea how they got there.

My owner was really in luck too because there was a whole sequence of three front and back pairs of pawprints all nicely lined up.

Capybara tracks

They are a bit hard to see so, once again, my owner outlined them. She made the front paws blue and the back paws red.

Outlined capybara tracks

You can see that my left paws were muddier than my right paws because they left better impressions.

The good thing about this whole event was that my owner finally saw that mud can be good. One of these days she is going to take the next step and roll in the mud with me. Then she’ll know what I’m eeping about.

———– Addendum (added 2010/12/28) ———————————————

It was raining today and even though my owner yelled at me when I came inside, I knew what I was doing. Here are some really beautiful pawprints. Turns out that mud on carpet is the best media for this type of art, not only does it capture the print accurately, it also captures the emotional content of the scene.