As Bruce has aged, (he’s 14 years old now) I made the
mistake of bringing Bruce and his bed into my bedroom at night. Luckily, gone are the days that he can jump
up on my bed with his arthritic knees… do dogs have knees? When he had, very
occasionally, slept on the bed, he would lie so close to me that I would be trapped
in the smallest sliver on the edge of the bed, subjected to him snoring in my
ear and keeping me at furnace temperature with his thick coat.
Nowadays, Bruce has found new and
more irritating ways to keeps me awake. For a relatively small dog (that is a
Jack Russell cross Chihuahua) he has a snore that, in volume, is close to a
Great Dane and, in complexity, a virtual symphony of snorts, groans, wheezes
and very occasional long breathless pauses. So loud is his snoring that one day
when I was on the phone with a friend and Bruce was snoring in the background, my
friend enquired what sort of machinery was operating in the room. ‘Not
machinery, just a small noisy dog’, was my reply.
There are also the times when
Bruce takes the opportunity at bedtime to do some major grooming via licking
and biting that reaches OCD proportions. After ten or fifteen minutes of
continuously licking of himself and the interior of his bed I am at screaming
point and the likelihood of a relaxing drifting into sleep is destroyed. Should
I wake during the night and switch on the light, Bruce decides that more licking
is required and my loud and persistent requests for cessation of his licking
are met with hurt looks and sly licks until he finally falls back to sleep.
Then there are the middle of the
night sessions when Bruce takes a meander around the house, opening the door to
the bedroom and strolling along the hallway with his clicky-clacky toenails on
tiles and then rubbing his face in the carpet with accompanying snorting and
snuffling noises a kin to an elephant seal attracting a mate. Having woken me
up with all the racket, his excursion has the double sleep-disturbing effect of
opening the bedroom door to the morning light falling directly on my face at
the crack of dawn.
The latest in his armoury of ways
to keep me awake is one of the most unpleasant. Fortunately it is not all that
common but it is particularly difficult to resolve. Most recently, I heard a
faint noise that woke me. I lay in the dark trying to determine if it was a
creak in the floorboards or a shifting on the house on its foundations or a
possums toe nails on the roof tiles. Having heightened my sense of hearing, the
other senses were awake too. And it was the sense of smell that was assaulted by
the foulest stench that seemed to emanate from a hairy and very guilty dog in
the corner. Fans, blasting, windows and doors opening did nothing to dilute the
potency of the odour. I had to adjourn to another room until it was safe to
return to my room…
For more visit www.madanimals.com.au
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