One of the most popular sub-genres of internet animal videos is the “unlikely friends” video. You know the type: a cat and a dog napping together, or a turtle giving some food to a fish, or whatever. And yet there is another sub-sub-genre of internet animal video still: that is, the unexplainable inter-species phenomenon. Earlier this year, we marveled over the footage of 18 turkeys performing a bizarre funeral rite around a dead cat. Add to that library this video of many, many hens, all pecking at and milling around a Great Pyrenese who reigns over them all like a benevolent god.
They peck at the bell on her neck, calling for charity and good tidings. It forms a Kurtz-like tableau, leading us to wonder if the dog knows that she is not the god of these people or if she has come unglued from reality, believing that there is a deeper truth to their worship. As she lays in the grass and they reform their circle around her, you must wonder if she believes herself to be the savior of these hens, or perhaps the bell-wearing harbinger of their doom. Horror and moral terror are her friends.