{"id":3002,"date":"2023-12-01T09:00:42","date_gmt":"2023-12-01T09:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/?p=3002"},"modified":"2023-11-20T00:29:43","modified_gmt":"2023-11-20T00:29:43","slug":"snoopy-snippets-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/2023\/12\/01\/snoopy-snippets-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Snoopy Snippets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Snoopy\u2019s breeder Sheryl certainly hadn<\/span>\u2019<\/span>t exaggerated when she said he was lively – indeed the liveliest of the six pups in his litter. I don\u2019t think \u201clively\u201d does him justice: \u201chyperactive\u201d, at times \u201cfrenzied\u201d, would be more accurate. He demanded my undivided attention when he was awake, so I had to do everything else while he slept – fortunately about half the time. He may have exhausted this old codger, but he also provided me with a never-ending supply of entertainment. I was highly amused to watch him chase a small spider\u2026 until he ate it. As I was when I introduced him to a new toy – a hollow, knobbly rubber ball with a bell inside it, at which he barked suspiciously for some 10 minutes before he accepted that it wasn\u2019t going to attack him. But best of all was his trick of turning one of his fluffy beds upside down, over himself, and running around, unseen, beneath it. I watched that three or four times, and every time my laughter verged on hysterical.<\/span><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t only the clinking ball which made Snoopy suspicious..In my toilet I keep a can of air freshener on the floor. Snoopy growls at it, knocks it over and, when it rolls from side to side on the tiles, he barks at it and, when he plucks up enough courage, attacks it. The movement and sound of my metal shoe horn, which I put on the timber floor while donning my walking shoes, has a similar effect on him.<\/span><\/p>\n

In my bedroom I have floor to ceiling mirror doors on the fitted wardrobe. When Snoopy first saw his reflexion, he seemed to like it, and rubbed noses with it. For some reason, he subsequently decided it wasn\u2019t friendly after all, and grew belligerent with it – both vocally and physically.<\/span><\/p>\n

Snoopy is very tactile, and I have my hands on him much of the time. That proved fortuitous when I saw a small lump on his head, which can\u2019t have been there long or I\u2018d have noticed it. I didn\u2019t know what it was, but I feared the worst. Fortunately, it was a Tuesday afternoon when Berry vets visit the valley so, rather than drive over the mountain to my regular vet in Bomaderry, I raced him into the village, where a vet removed it, examined it under a microscope, and diagnosed it as a paralysis tick. Happily Snoopy suffered no ill effects. I wish I could say the same for myself.<\/span><\/p>\n

I knew, from past experience, that puppies chew a lot. However, Snoopy took that activity to new heights – or more accurately depths. He found that turning that fluffy bed upside down offered more fun than merely running around under it. Specifically, by tearing open the material which lined its base he could extract the stuffing from it. He could achieve that objective silently so that, by the time I\u2019d read a single page of my newspaper – in the same room – I turned my head to see the whole floor covered in white fluff.<\/span><\/p>\n

Have you ever tried to get to sleep with a dog in your bed base? I don\u2019t mean in, or under, the bed, but between those two strata. And have you ever seen the springs under your bed? I hadn\u2019t, until strips of black material started to appear around my bed. By lying on the floor and peering up, there were the springs – exposed purely for the entertainment of You Know Who. Once again, I couldn\u2019t share his amusement – especially when he hid amongst the springs and I scratched my hands in attempting to extract him. But, if I left him\u00a0 in there, what sounded like the unmusical tones of a novice guitar player precluded all thoughts of sleep.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, I wouldn\u2019t want you to think that Snoopy is completely lacking in musical appreciation. In my entrance hall I have a stand of small Burmese bells, each of which has a different sound; and Snoopy delights in ringing those he can reach. And his musical taste doesn\u2019t stop there; he evidently shares my love of opera, as I learned when I found a CD of Verdi\u2019s <\/span>Nabucco<\/span><\/i> in his canvas crate.<\/span><\/p>\n

Puppies are like young children, in both good and bad ways. When Snoopy didn\u2019t get his own way, he\u2019d throw a tantrum. So, as soon as he\u2019d had his second vaccination, at 11 weeks old, I wasted no time in enrolling him in puppy preschool. For the first two lessons I was able to report, truthfully, that Snoopy wasn\u2019t the worst behaved student, (although he was certainly the liveliest), because one of the other four pups in the class barked incessantly. But then the offender was expelled – or, as subsequently became apparent, set aside for personal tuition – leaving Snoopy to claim the crown for disobedience.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Snoopy\u2019s spirit prompted his teacher Sam to declare him \u201cquite a character\u201d, I felt obliged to correct her: \u201cTwo characters, actually – Jekyll and Hyde\u201d. Nevertheless, she, his class-mates and I managed to survive all five classes in the course, at the end of which he was presented with a graduation certificate. I only wish I could say that he graduated with honours.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tony Barnett<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Snoopy\u2019s breeder Sheryl certainly hadn\u2019t exaggerated when she said he was lively – indeed the liveliest of the six pups in his litter. I don\u2019t think \u201clively\u201d does him justice: \u201chyperactive\u201d, at times \u201cfrenzied\u201d, would be more accurate. He demanded my undivided attention when he was awake, so I had to do everything else while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":3003,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-featured"],"acf":[],"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"Kangaroo Valley Voice","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice","push-errors":false,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3004,"href":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3002\/revisions\/3004"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kangaroovalley.nsw.au\/valleyvoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}