Living with Alice

Meet Alice. She is a fine beast, who is always sure to make her presence (and desires) known. She shares a very large pen with three cockerels and a hen. Fastidious, willful and petulant, Alice thinks nothing of breaking down a fence or a door to get her way. Dogs disperse at high speed when Alice lumbers towards the kitchen door for breakfast. Only the young and uninitiated take her on. A nip on the ear or an attempt at the snout ends up in ear piercing yelps as Alice lunges her head sideways swiping the juvenile with her tusks.

On waking, Alice demands to be released from her pen. Everything in the house stops and we fly to let her out before the pen is destroyed. Immediately out of the pen, the flood gates open as Alice embarks on her ablutions. (She will never allow any bodily functions to take place within her pen.) Refreshed, she lumbers up to the kitchen door and grunts for breakfast.

In the winter, Alice sleeps under her ladybird blanket in the sittingroom. In the less cold months she is happy with a duck and cockerel down duvet in her house.

My Life with 20 Dogs (Sputnik)

Sputnik was never meant to happen: But we got home one day to find a maggoty ball of scabs curled up in a state beyond caring ... or even knowing. The entire night spent in my arms, the next day we were both scratching and scratching and scratching. This lasted for 2 months.

In the meantime Sputnik began to live again - and now we sometimes wish he was not quite so lively.

(Well, that was at least until last week when Sputnik came down with Biliary - a dangerous illness carried by ticks that attacks dogs. Poor Sputnik was ill for 5 days, no longer attacking shoes or bottoms of trousers - instead invallided to bed with a brain splitting migrain, and other terrible aches and pains. Dr Rens with two days of injections soon saw Sputnik over the worst, and he is now back to his spirited self.)

Recovering from a deadly migrain - do I or don't I!

Part Jack Russel, part Maltese, he has the worst and the best of both. There is nothing more fun that a game of "Moley-Moley" or "Hunt the Rodent"...

Since becoming human, Sputnik has progressively developed aliases - from Sputnik to Nik for short, then to Nicholas!!**! when he is bad, and St Nicholas when he is good - which is not very often.

Nik is self-assured and confident to the point of being cheeky. He is always ready to do more than his duty - at night choosing to sleep outside the fowlhouse, disciplining our insomiac and raving roosters into an uneasy nocturnal quietude.