From the very beginning, a teddy bear was Snoopy’s favourite toy. He played with it much of the time, and – as you might recall from the photo in Chapter 1 – he took it to bed with him. True, he nibbled its extremities, but no more than he’d have nibbled mine given the chance. But suddenly, after some four months, he took an intense dislike of poor Teddy’s face, and brutally removed it. I did buy two teddy bears in anticipation of Snoopy’s arrival, and have kept one aside until I thought it might survive his attentions. I wonder how much longer that might be.
Snoopy’s reaction to traffic is interesting. Fortunately there’s little of it on Jenanter Drive, which leads nowhere. But when he hears a vehicle on our walks he stops dead, watches it drive past, and then takes off in hot pursuit, apparently trying to catch it. Since I’m hanging onto the other end of his lead, that can be a challenging experience for me.
The only occasions when Snoopy failed to display his usual energy were meal times. He often grazed, sometimes not finishing his breakfast until well into the afternoon. When I told Sheryl, his breeder, she was horrified, and suggested that I introduce kangaroo meat into his meals. Since I always accepted Sheryl’s advice (except, I regret to admit, when it came to matters of discipline), I substituted roo meat for the processed pet meats I’d previously mixed with his puppy pellets. To say that Snoopy approved of this change of diet would be a massive understatement. At first, I barely had time to leave the laundry (where I fed him) before his bowl was empty. Later, he managed to extract the roo meat from underneath the dry food, sometimes not finishing that until bedtime. One night, however, he didn’t finish it even then – possibly due to his having eaten a live grasshopper on our walk that afternoon.
Fearlessness can be a mixed blessing. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, I was proud of a very young Snoopy when he lost his initial fear of large dogs. But it can lead to recklessness. Shortly after a walk in the rain – have I mentioned that Snoopy doesn’t like to get even his feet wet in our garden, but doesn’t care how wet he gets on walks? – he jumped onto my lap with a toy in his mouth. I’d wielded two towels on him, but he treats them as playthings, so my efforts to dry him were not entirely successful. Not wanting a damp dog on my lap, I managed to prize the toy from his mouth and threw it across the room. He leapt off in pursuit – awkwardly, as he had to change direction in mid-air to avoid a table – with such disregard for his safety that I feared he’d land on his head… though I doubt if even that would have acted as a disincentive.
When I moved into my study to write the preceding paragraph, while the experience was fresh in my mind, I foolishly left my newspaper and reading glasses on my chair. When I returned, I found my glasses, entwined with the toy I’d thrown, on a lounge. They were fortunately unharmed, but it taught me not to underestimate Snoopy’s prowess in oneupmanship.
By late January, when Snoopy was seven months old, he still didn’t smell, but he was biting himself a lot. So I thought I’d take advantage of a hot day to give him his first bath. Unfortunately, I made a bad choice. Two bad choices, actually. First, I bathed him in the laundry sink, rather than in my shower; I had great difficulty stopping him jumping out of it; and I should have worn bathers. The manufacturer of the puppy shampoo recommended that I “take a photo. Wet dogs are so cute”. I dismissed the advice as an invitation to disaster. The second mistake was my choice of an exceptionally hot day. The bathing experience supercharged his energy – something I wouldn’t have thought possible – which caused me to take him for a walk in the hope he might expend some of that energy. At 6pm it was still 35ºC, so a circuit of Jenanter Drive depleted my energy much more than Snoopy’s.
The heat persevered well into that evening so, while watching the tennis on TV, I was sipping cointreau on ice. Fortunately there was only a little left by the time I left the room during a change of ends break. On my return, Snoopy was on the arm of my lounge, eagerly lapping the irresistible nectar from my glass on the adjoining table.
Snoopy is very photogenic, and I’ve found it hard to choose, between the many photos I’ve taken of him, one relevant to the contents of each chapter. The photo in Chapter 4, with Snoopy poking his head through the roof of his crate, was taken in its early stages of damage. Since then a series of photos chronicles its progressive annihilation. That accompanying this chapter might suggest that the crate has well outlived its use-by date, but I couldn’t bring myself to deprive Snoopy of the evidently favourite object of his attentions.
