Thread: Photos of your dog

It’s kind of a family in-joke, not that we should be joking about autism of course. But there is definitely something spectrum related when it comes to our little bitch Staffy. Snip, her name is. Loosely translated from Cape Afrikaans slang it means little tart. Odd creature. Pretty sure if she were human she would be medicated.

She’s just a very odd little dog. I think she has special powers…

She can read your mind, and understands complex sentences even when you speaking in code so as not to get her all excited. There is nothing that you can do that might involve her that she doesn’t know about before you’ve even decided to do it. She’ll appear out of nowhere with the slightly cocked head and expectant look on her face - righto dad let’s go, keys are over there and don’t forget your raincoat.

Her sense of timing is uniquely spot on, she appears under your feet or chair as if by magic, about a half second before you drop that piece of food. She usually catches it in mid air. How does she know this is about to happen? She can of course tell the time perfectly. Even when daylight saving changes the time by an hour, she knows that it’s 5 pm, dinner time, even when yesterday 5 pm was 4 pm. How does she know that?

She is an uncanny hunter. We have numerous thickets of flax, griselinia, all sorts, if she decides there’s a rat in there she will wait it out for hours. I’ve watched her in the garden in the driving rain, locked solid pointing at the bushes, quivering from the cold, ready to pounce. She won’t give in. Finally her ratty prey makes a beeline for the dry shed and meets an untimely end.

The list of oddness goes on forever. She has been known to take a nap in the bath (without water thankfully), in the cupboard under the kitchen sink and on the trampoline. She likes to wear a Wonder Woman vest. She will go for a dip in the cattle trough, then seek out something exceptionally dead and roll in it with glee. Her dreaming has to be seen to be believed, a pantomime of growls, yelps, whistles and twitches. Sometimes she just about stops breathing all together. She rolls on her back incessantly. She’ll go up the top of the paddock hill, turn over onto her back and roll herself all the way to the bottom, upside down all the way. She sits in the driveway for hours in summer, licking air. Lick lick lick lick lick lick lick… hours and hours. Does she think she’s a lizzard? She’s a constant bum rubber. It’s not worms, she just likes doing it. She’ll scoot her bumhole from one end of the house to the other, then turn around and sniff her bum trail all the way to where she begun, then sneeze uproariously, I swear she’s laughing.

She is highly strung there’s no doubt about that. She’s one of those nervous energy little dogs that finds it hard to relax. You could feed her twice what her brother gets and she won’t put on an ounce of fat. I think most of the energy she consumes through food is expended in weirdness.

And here she is performing one of her routinely odd behaviours, sitting on her brothers head. I’ve never seen a dog do this before, not just the sitting but the tolerating being sat on.





Her brother isn’t odd at all. Just very, very cool.

It is exactly 5pm. Guess who’s just turned up.