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BLAME ‘SNOOPY’

The heartless Bronx man who killed his newlywed wife’s beloved beagle claims he was acting in self-defense, twice stabbing the defenseless pooch after it “attacked me and jumped at my throat,” authorities said yesterday.

Brian McCafferty plunged a kitchen knife into the 2-year-old dog, whom wife Jeanine Tulimero had named Jerry, Wednesday at 5:45 a.m. during a booze-fueled rage at the couple’s Throgs Neck apartment.

“I killed the dog. The dog attacked me and jumped at my throat,” McCafferty told cops, according to court papers.

“I stabbed the dog, and I shot the dog with my BB gun. I hated that dog.”

McCafferty, 28, said he attacked Jerry after Tulimero, whom he wed last month, stormed out following a heated argument, police said.

The slaying comes a month after the trial of former Met minor-league pitcher Joseph Petcka, accused of kicking his girlfriend’s 7-pound cat to death last year, ended in a hung jury in Manhattan.

McCafferty’s lawyer, Martin Galvin, said his client “received an injury” to his right hand during the skirmish with Jerry.

“He was bitten during the incident, and he reacted,” Galvin told the judge at McCafferty’s arraignment yesterday at Bronx Criminal Court.

McCafferty, a burly, 6-foot-tall construction worker who came to New York from Ireland seven years ago, was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals, possession of firearms, and torturing and injuring animals.

A bloody knife was found in the kitchen and a BB gun on the living-room table in the couple’s Patricia Lane apartment, police sources said.

Another BB gun was stashed under McCafferty’s side of the bed, the sources said.

Jerry, a neutered, 26- pound male, suffered a stab wound to the chest and another in the abdomen, according to law-enforcement sources.

Neighbors told The Post a horrified Tulimero, 30, wailed, “Where’s my dog? Where’s my dog?” when she returned home and found Jerry’s lifeless, bloody body.

She then frantically called 911, and cops arrested McCafferty.

Jerry’s body was taken to Tulimero’s parents’ home Wednesday, but Bronx prosecutors retrieved it yesterday afternoon in order for the ASPCA to conduct the necropsy.

A Bronx judge also issued an order of protection against McCafferty, commanding him to stay away from his wife.

McCafferty has one prior arrest, for assault, police said, adding that it did not involve his wife or animals.

McCafferty’s mother-in-law, Roseanne Tulimero, said her daughter was “very upset” by Jerry’s death.

“It wasn’t an argument between them,” she said. “[McCafferty] is just an alcoholic.”

Additional reporting by Kerry Wills and Perry Chiaramonte

john.doyle@nypost.com