My dog's little joys

I've often noticed that Sophia is not interested in strawberries. She doesn't seem to see their red color and, when I put a few strawberries under her snout, she's not inclined to taste them. Cherries, though, are a different affair, including the tiny specimens that fall from one of my rare roadside trees.

Sophia crunches the cherries, seeds and all, before swallowing them.

In the case of walnuts, of course, the process is different. She crunches the nuts slightly, to break them apart, and then she delicately picks out the edible kernel fragments.

One of Sophia's regular preoccupations consists of searching for mysterious creatures, maybe lizards or mice, under the edge of the old concrete footpath in front of the house.

As soon as she detects an animal odor, Sophia barks a little (maybe to warn me that there's an undesirable alien presence at Gamone) and starts to dig a preliminary hole by scratching out soil and loose pebbles. As soon as the opening is big enough, Sophia sticks her snout in and starts to snort. And this activity can preoccupy her for half an hour.

A day or so later, after Sophia has either captured and destroyed the intruder (?) or forgotten about its presence, all that remains for me is to poke the soil and pebbles back in place.