A Crabby Time at the Beach

Today, the weather was nice again, but we opted to just go to the beach instead of pulling out the hammock. The weather is supposed to get colder in the next few days, so we wanted to make the most of the warm weather before it goes away for three or four days. Ah, Texas winters... The puppies are always eager to go to the beach and we had no trouble getting them into their harnesses and into the car. We fooled them a little by taking them all outside before bringing out the harness bag and bringing them in one by one to put their harnesses on. When they are in their crates and see the bag, they go nuts, and we wanted to avoid the squealing. 
We were having an uneventful walk until Miss M made a discovery. She was doing her normal archaeological activities (i.e. digging big holes in the sand), jumping, digging, spinning, digging some more, when all of a sudden she started shaking something. 

I think Mr. Crab was just as shocked as we were that Miss M found him. There weren't even any crab holes around that we saw. As it turns out, Miss M has serious crab hunting skills. The hole that she dug to get him was about 2 feet deep! We are convinced that she could totally be trained as a search and rescue dog.

Notice the surprised crab in the bottom right of this picture

Apparently, crabs play dead too. I thought for sure the puppies had killed him when I saw him laying on his back not moving. Then, just as a curious puppy nose got within range of his claws, he sprang to life. This proved very effective as the puppies took turns investigating and having their noses pinched.

Miss S about to discover Mr. Crabs wily ways

Miss B going in for her nose pinch

All of the puppies trying to tell if he is still alive- notice how far back they are

Notice how he is now standing back on his feet again with his claws up

Mr. C decided two nose pinches was enough and told the others they would need to handle that themselves

After a few minutes, we decided to quit torturing the crab and let him go on his merry way. Miss B was the voice of reason here. She was concerned that if we didn't leave him alone, he would tell the rest of his crabby friends that pitbulls were mean dogs. She didn't want that kind of stigma within the crab community.

The rest of the walk was pleasant. Miss M found an empty crab carapace that she then carried around and Miss S checked out some birds- they didn't want to be friends with her.