Daisy seems to have made it her mission to humiliate me in public. She’s now around two and a half years old but I still have to tell her to go do “pee-pee and poo-poo” at night even if the neighbors can hear me; failure to give her that very particular instruction is likely to result in a wet bed. That would be bad enough, but now I must also administer frequent cuddle top-ups during our main walk each day.

The need for a cuddle top-up is signaled by nudging and nibbling the backs of my knees and generally getting under my feet. When I stop and look down, there’s that gorgeous, cheeky little face looking right up at me and before I know it, Daisy’s walking up my legs with her front paws. The top-up can now begin, and should always include the following key components: kisses to the bonce and/or the cheeks, ruffling of the ears, tickling of the tummy and massaging of the chest.

As far as I can tell the ordering of these components doesn’t matter but Daisy can tell if the process is being rushed, and if I bring the top-up to a premature close the demand will be re-issued. I’ve been caught giving cuddle top-ups by other dog walkers several times now; sometimes I think that maybe I wasn’t spotted, but then I see that tell-tale grin and shake of the head as they pass me and I know the game’s up. If I try to guide Daisy to a less exposed location she seems to forget the top-up, but the moment we get back on the path those pesky knee-nibbles come back in force. She wants her cuddle top-up, and she wants it in a publicly viewable place.  I suppose I could resist it if really wanted to but.. nope, she’s just too cute.

Not wanting to leave Monkey out of things I try to make a fuss of him too, but when he’s on a walk he’s just not interested. He only wants affection when he’s back home, and given the amount of time he spends on his back getting a tummy tickle, I reckon he’s a very happy, contented boy.

Unfortunately, he’s also a boy who’s recently been in the doghouse.

Monkey has always been a bit of a silly boy when it comes to beds. Like Biggles before him he has the delusion that he’s a world-class bed maker, but whereas Biggles’ bed-making focused on trying to tug things into shape, Monkey prefers to scratch manically with his paws. When he does this in a crate the sound of his nails on the plastic base sounds a lot like an old-school DJ scratching a record, so of course we call him DJ Monkey.

Monkey will have a DJ session anytime and anywhere; he’s even gone hell-for-leather on Biggles’ canvas hammock chair – while Daisy was in it alongside him! It’s bad news if he does it on one our leather sofas, and it’s annoying if he decides to do it at night when we’re trying to some sleep, but until recently he’d never really damaged anything with his antics. That changed when I got an extra plush crate bed for him. It had really thick memory foam and lovely fat padded sides that were purpose-built to be a Beagle chin rest. I was certain it would keep him extra warm and comfy as we head into autumn and winter. It won’t of course, as it now has a big hole right in the center of it, not just through the top layer, but though the inner bag containing the foam and through the base layer as well. He’s totaled it.

He acted quite sheepish when I discovered the damage and gave him the “Oi!! Monkey what have you done!!?” routine. I think he got the message that this was a bit worse than shredding a whole loo roll on the hall rug or pulling plates and food containers off the kitchen worktops.  He rested on our bed with his head between his paws as I cleaned up the mess and installed one of his older backup beds, and he got into his crate quickly and quietly when I pointed at (usually I have to remind him that all of his bits have to be in the crate before I can close it).

The Monkster didn’t spend long in the doghouse of course, and he never did any of the duvet-shredding that Beanie and Biggles indulged in as pups so he deserves some credit for that, but when it comes to beds he’s still a very, very silly boy.

That’s the deep, contented nap of a boy who has pulled off the most technically demanding, physics-challenging and artistic poop known to Beagle kind. I hate to admit it, but it far surpasses even Biggles’ best efforts – though it was The Biggly Boy’s tutelage that undoubtedly laid the foundation for Monkey’s faecal triumph.

We were in a woodland area of one of our local parks. As is his way, Monkey had already let loose with a couple of decently-sized but otherwise unremarkable number twos; bulging around his back passage signalled that number three was on the way. As we walked past a tree he looked like he was beginning a squat, but he didn’t drop straight to target depth – instead he kept shuffling his feet, executing what I soon realised was a precision docking maneouver that would have made NASA proud. He reversed his bum really, really close to the tree – so close that I feared the bark might seal his opening – and then instead of lowering into a deep squat he raised his rear end as far as he could, kind of walking it up the tree. When he reached his maximum height he began to push, all the while maintaining pressure against the tree surface.

You know those gel stamps that leave a circular patty of slow-release, fresh-smelling cleaning agents on the side of the toilet bowl? Well this was essentially the same thing, only bigger, brown colored and definitely not fresh-smelling. When he’d finished Monkey didn’t even turn to examine the result – he didn’t need to see it to know it was good – but Daisy and I stood and marvelled. After a second or two Daisy went in close for a sniff. I didn’t, but I was severely tempted to whip out my phone and take a snap. I wish I had; moments like this are what make me proud to be a Beagle daddy.

Oh Monkey, I’m so proud to have you as my brother!

Thanks Daisy. It’s just what I do.

Also I have really big balls.

A video and a few more shots to finish. As you can see, Daisy’s respect for Monkey was shortlived, and was followed by humping attempts, chases and wrestling.

Why is it that so often when Monkey’s having a crisis, the humies around him burst out laughing? To be fair his most recent brush with Monkeycide did have me concerned for a few seconds, until I worked out what was actually going on.

We’d just started our walk, and I noticed that Monkey was really lagging behind, holding himself strangely and not moving normally. It looked like maybe he was in pain, and the way he was hunching up had me thinking that his back was hurting him; there are certainly plenty of Beagles with back problems. I think I said out loud “Oh please no” and then suddenly he sat on the ground in a very lazy puppy sit, as though he was about to scoot, but he didn’t scoot – he just sat there. I bent down to check him out, and then I realised the true cause of his distress. In our part of the world we get a particularly pesky species of insect during summer; they don’t bite, but they harass you continually, buzzing away as they circle your head and repeatedly dive-bomb your ears, your nostrils, your eyes, try to get into your mouth and land on you. Once you’ve got a group of these annoying little buggers interested in you, they’ll stick with you for miles and often the only way to get any peace is to kill ’em. The good news is they only seem to be a problem for around six weeks and usually they’re done by mid-July, but this year they’re running late.

As soon as I got close to The Monkster I saw and heard a few of them buzzing round him, but they weren’t interested in his head; instead they were harassing his bum hole. I couldn’t help but laugh, which Monkey didn’t appreciate at all. He gave me a particularly pathetic, hurt look and I could almost hear him say “Oh thanks Dad. Yeah, thanks a lot for laughing at me in the midst of my very serious predicament!”. I took pity on him and tried to swat the flies away as best I could, then Daisy came to help out by trying to catch them. Unlike Beanie before her, Daisy’s actually pretty well tuned for hunting things and I think she nabbed one of them. Regardless, our joint efforts distracted the flies enough to continue on our journey, but of course they kept coming back to do flybys of Monkey’s sensitive exhaust port.

“I know Monkey, I hate them too, but if they stay with us all the way back home I’ll hit the little buggers with spray and we’ll have our revenge!” I said to comfort him, and it did seem to help; he looked back at me gratefully and was decidedly more stoic for the rest of the walk. Those flies did indeed follow us all the way round and right back into our garden, but they’d split by the time I came out of the kitchen armed with fast knockdown spray. Or, just possibly.. Daisy got the lot of ’em!

Yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got flies in my tummy :)

Speaking of Daisy, she’s responsible for the second “howler” of this post, in fact she is the howler. Daisy’s really found her voice this year and she’s not afraid to use it; she’s become almost as vocal as Biggles, always alerting the world to latest infringement  of Beagle Law committed by the neighbors, by delivery guys, and by sheep, cows and birds. Let’s face it pretty much anything can get the howl machine going. In the following video, the very first snippet is on Loudoun hill, and in the very top-left corner you can just see the trigger for the noise pollution: another walker was by the summit trig point and had decided, somewhat oddly, to lay on his back and waggle his feet in the air. After few rounds of verbal abuse he stopped, but of course Daisy didn’t and Monkey kept supporting her even though he clearly had no clue what all the fuss was about!