The Spike and the Leopard

The Adventures of Junior and Spike the Wonder Dog. Book Five: Spike and the Leopard. This is the fifth book in a series of 31 children's books written and illustrated by Moshe. Book Five's first two pictures display Junior and Spike dressed in leopard skins that relates to the story dad tells at bedtime about a jungle boy and his lion dog. The adventure begins with Junior and Spike wrestling in bed, before finding Dad working in the garage. The family races to the kitchen for breakfast, before riding Dad's creation, a trike named Big Grape, to the zoo. At the zoo, they see orangutans, chimpanzees, a bonobo, a mongoose lemur, sarus cranes, California Channel Island foxes, yellow-eyed leapfrogs, penguins, Philippine eagles, before a leopard escapes and terrorizes the zoo's visitors. Spike runs to the rescue, by treeing the huge leopard.
The Adventures series are action-packed, often with a lesson for the children. Usually a rescue occurs, performed by Dad or Spike and sometimes Junior. Some adventure involves Junior's mischievousness. Only Book One does not end with Dad telling Junior and Spike a bedtime story. All 31 books begin with Junior on page one and Spike on page two. Both are dressed in some type of costume related to the bedtime story Dad tells at the end of the book, except Book One, where in the first two pages, Junior and Spike are dressed as Superman, with Junior displaying a J and Spike a S.
I based The Adventures series on my son and his pit-bull, whose name actually is Spike the Wonder Dog. We received the Red-nose pit-bull, when it was three weeks old, wanting to fight and already eating solid food, hence the name Spike the Wonder Dog. We lived on my ranch in Three Points, Arizona, where I raised show roosters and built motorcycles. Spike terrorized all the rabbits and anything else he could catch. I once watched him crash head-on into the bumper of a Ranger pickup traveling approximately 10 mph. I believe Spike put a dent in the bumper. I had watering troughs made from 3-inch irrigation pipe, on my rooster pens that were over 100 feet long, glued together from 20-foot sections. Spike ripped every one of them off the pens, brutalizing them further until breaking down to the 20-foot sections. He would do some type of balancing routine to get the pipe pointed upward, so its contents whether rodent, rabbit or whatever slid down to his mouth, which was tightly closed to hold up the pipe. I cannot remember how many times I watched the rabbit or packrat jump out the other end of the pipe, away from Spike. I always wondered how many times a rattlesnake rolled down the pipe to Spike. Spike was a neighborhood kids' best friend, not caring how rough they played with him.