For those of you who have not been visiting my blog for long, we have a dog we adopted at the end of January who likes to carry squeaky toys with him wherever he goes.  Because he was previously mistreated, he has issues with food.  So, getting a new squeaky toy every once in a while has been a more effective reward than traditional doggy treats.  This has resulted in some unexpected growth to the family.

Many weeks ago, we had an “incident” where Lamb disappeared.  She went missing for two weeks.  About the second week, ‘Possum also went missing.  We were suspicious.  About a week after posting the story of our Lost Lamb, Lamb turned up again.  She was hiding under the bed.  ‘Possum turned up about a day later, mysteriously reappearing without any explanation.

Interestingly, since that incident, Lamb and ‘Possum were rarely seen together.

In the meantime, new members of the family seemed to be getting out of control.  I decided I needed to do some new portraits since it’s been a while since I last shot the entire collection of Tisen’s collection.

Unfortunately, quite a few members of the family were out in the car, but I did manage get a group portrait of Red Dog, Minnie, Eddie, Baby Beaver, ‘Possum, Lion, Big Dog, Duck, Goat, Lamb, and Blue Dog.  In the car were Squirrel, Mr. Beaver, Puppy Luv, Tiger, Jack, and Hog.  I’m thinking you can probably figure out which ones are which.

What I didn’t expect when shooting was the revelation of some really strange relationships.  As it turns out, apparently Lamb and Duck have something going on, but ‘Possum is not over Lamb.  This was revealed to me in the middle of the shoot when Duck and Lamb unexpectedly started to run for one another and ‘Possum got in the middle of it.  In fact, ‘Possum grabbed Duck by the throat and, had I not intervened, Duck would have been a goner.

By taking a photo of the event in action every few seconds, I managed to get 18 shots that I’ve strung together into a video.  It’s a bit  . . . uh . . . rough, but you’ll get the idea.

It was a lot of fun to be shooting and have two of your models suddenly expose previously undetected emotion.  Even better, a third participant decided to be extremely jealous.

At least I know where to look if Lamb disappears again!