Today Beanie is officially one year old. To celebrate her birthday, her normal breakfast was followed by something pretty special:

That is, believe it or not, a sardine birthday cake. You may notice there’s a bit of a gap in the ring of biscuits around it. It shouldn’t be hard to guess how that happened..

Despite being a Beagle, Beanie does respond to the “leave” command if you’re firm enough:

..and that saved enough of the cake to slice up and take to the park as treats not only for Beanie but her pals.

Now it’s no secret that Beanie’s favorite activity is chasing, or being chased by, other dogs. Today, her first chase was with a fit, fast young girl called – a little confusingly – Murphy.

When Murphy left Beanie split her time between Kirby and her sister Bella – who was also celebrating her first birthday. As the two sisters have “come of age” they can now enjoy the vices reserved for adults:

Yes, it’s true; they can now legally enjoy a squeaky can of latex lager in public. In this case there was no drinking of course, just running. And Beanie certainly did run. And run. And run. At one point no dogs where actually chasing her but that didn’t seem to matter, she just kept on running for the sheer joy of it.

Eventually she took a few breaks for wrestling and mud eating..

..but then she spotted an unguarded object wrapped in a poo bag, and after a lightning-fast raid to acquire it, it was back to chasing.

On this occasion the bag was wrapping a genuine lager can that some park visitor had thoughtlessly discarded, but in the past she’s run off with the real deal. I once spent half an hour trying to get a bag full (and I really do mean full!) of Weimaraner poo off her. Once the bag started to show signs of wear I’m sorry to say my resolve crumbled. There are some things you just don’t want to touch with bare hands..

Back at home, it was time for Beanie to open her pressies, and there were quite a few waiting for her!

She got the hang of unwrapping very quickly as you can see.

One gift from our friends Kathleen and Neil was an immediate hit: pizzle sticks. What’s a pizzle stick you may ask? Well, to put it delicately it’s the dried primary naughty bit of a bull.

Or to put it more plainly, it’s a bull’s willy. Yep that was my reaction too, but Beanie thought it was great!

We got a her a couple of presents too, to give that one good braincell of hers a workout.

The blue thing is another one of the those toys that dispenses a treat if it’s subjected to enough violence, although in this case it’s weighted so that it always returns to an upright position.

The other toy is a “dog tornado”..

It’s basically a set of revolving discs with slots for treats. Depending on where you place the treats , the dog may have to learn to align several of the discs in order to liberate a treat. These toys are obviously an indulgence on our part, but they may help to keep Beanie occupied when her little brother Biggles – possibly coming to stay with us as early as next Saturday – is in need of a nap!