We’ve worked quite hard at getting Beanie to walk to heel, but there are times when she still can’t resist pulling, such as when we’re entering the park at the start of a walk.  Lately I’ve been feeling that these few moments of successful pulling (successful in the sense that it gets her closer to her desired destination) are undoing a lot of our hard work. I found a post in the Dogsey forums about harnesses and to my surprise a lot of the posters reported that using a harness had reduced their dog’s tendency to pull. I don’t know why – maybe when the resistance is against the chest rather than the neck it doesn’t trigger the opposition reflex quite as much? Regardless, we decided it was worth a try and started searching.

I quickly found plenty of harnesses that actually claim – in some cases even guarantee – to reduce pulling, but I rejected most of them for various reasons:

• I’m wary of harnesses that use plastic clips – one such harness caused the death of Beanie’s sister Ruby
• I don’t like harnesses that fit over the dog’s snout – they look overly restrictive to me
• Checking through customer reviews, many of the more promising models have big problems with chafing

After a while Susan happened on the “Easy Walk No Pull Harness” made by a company in the US.  This has the leash attachment point at the front – over the dog’s chest. The idea is that when the dog pulls they’re forced to turn in towards their owner, and so learn that pulling doesn’t get them anywhere. On closer examination I found that the harness uses the dreaded plastic fasteners… but it’s designed so that you can attach the lead to both the collar and the harness at the same time. I hunted down a UK seller, and ordered one.

Well that was a few days ago, and I can report that the harness actually works – Beanie just doesn’t pull when it’s on, and yet it doesn’t seem to cramp her style in any other way. I remove the harness completely when she’s walking off lead though, just in case there could be any chafing problems. I’m hoping that after a long enough pull-free period Beanie will just accept that walking nicely is the way to go, whether the harness is on or not.

During the last week Beanie has taken up a number of classic doggy pursuits that I’d rather hoped she would bypass…

Coprophragialicious

Beagles have a particularly bad reputation for poo eating, but until this week Beanie had shown no interest in this particular dietary choice. Actually that’s not entirely true, as my earlier post “This chocolate smells funny” attests, but other than that it was all sniffing and no chewing.

All that changed on a recent visit to Pollock Park. A horse had left an outrageously large pile of fresh poo right in the middle of the path, and before we could stop her Beanie ran over to investigate. After the briefest of sniffings she grabbed a big chunk of it and sprinted away from us so we couldn’t deprive her of her prize. She then set about consuming the poo with such relish… well.. you could just imagine Marks and Spencer doing an advert about that horse’s droppings: “This isn’t just horse poo; this is rich, chunky organic poo du cheval drizzled with fresh Glasgow rain water”

Neither of us wanted a kiss from her for a few hours after that, I can tell you. And since that unfortunate incident Beanie’s always on the look out for another all-you-can-eat poo buffet.

Can I dig it? Yes you can! (but I really wish you wouldn’t)

Remember we recently had the garden drained and returfed? Well accordingly Beanie has now become a digger. She keeps trying to bury her favorite raw hide chew, presumably so that no-one else can steal it.

It’s quite a comical thing to watch. She looks like she’s carrying the weight of the world on her little shoulders as she hunts for a suitable hiding place. She digs hurriedly, deposits her treasure and begins covering it but then she’s struck by doubt: will she remember where she’s put it? She unburies it a little and tests that she’ll be able to retrieve the chew when she needs it. She runs off to play but worriedly returns a few more times to make sure everything’s still OK. By the time of her next trip into the garden, she’s evidently decided that her chew isn’t quite safe enough, so it has to be retrieved and reburied elsewhere. Of course, after a day or two in the ground that chew isn’t looking too healthy but that doesn’t seem to matter to Beanie!

Do I make you horny baby? Do I?

Dogs, as in male canines, hump legs. That’s well known, in fact there are loads of videos of it happening on YouTube. Well, here’s one more:

Yep that’s Beanie. Yep she’s a girl, not a boy. Yep she’s humping like her life depended on it.Apparently, it’s not uncommon for female dogs to do this, and the popular view seems to be that it’s a show of dominance. Certainly it’s something we’ll gently but firmly discourage!

I think I may be getting a new USB dongle for our laptop though: http://www.theusbhumpingdog.com/

Now that she’s crossed the five month boundary, we can apparently expect Beanie to start behaving a little like an adolescent child: rebelling against authority, copying anti-social behavior from other dogs to improve her street cred and so on.

I thought we might be seeing the first sign of this last week when I caught her hawking and spitting on the carpet. That’s just great I thought – we’ve now got a Beagle who likes to gob in the house! I had dark visions of what the future might hold. Rebellious Beanie hanging out with the wrong crowd (probably border terriers), drinking from discarded beer cans and bottles of Buckfast, mugging old dogs and stealing their treats etc. Come to think of it, she’s already had a go at shoplifting! She snatched a hide shoe on our last visit to the pet shop and would happily have walked out the door without me paying.

Fortunately, Susan had a different interpretation of Beanie’s unlicensed loogies and made an appointment with the vet for what appeared to be the doggy equivalent of a cold.

Beanie enjoys visits to the vet. Everyone makes a fuss of her and more often than not the nice secretary gives her a couple of treats. This time was very different however. The second we announced ourselves at the desk, the secretary said “oh that’s the dog with the cough” and asked us to wait outside in the car park and until her slot came up. No cuddles, no strokes and more importantly no treats! Instead Beanie was being shunned like a leper. She may as well have had a tag on her collar with the word “unclean” scrawled on it.

When the vet called us in she carried out a brief examination and questioned us about where we take Beanie for her walks. As soon as we mentioned one particular park, she nodded and said our Beanie had probably being caught up in a local epidemic of kennel cough, or to be more accurate infectious tracheobronchitis. The treatment would be a short course of antibiotics helped along by small doses of human chesty cough medicine (Benylin, Venos). Now that she knew that Beanie wasn’t carrying the plague, the vet was happy to give Beanie a cuddle and our little treasure showed her appreciation by covering almost the whole examination bench in short white Beagle hairs. [Quite a large proportion of Beanie’s coat is black, yet somehow she always sheds white hairs when she’s on a dark surface…]

We kept Beanie at home in isolation for a couple of days:

but then we decided to make the most of the recent good weather by going to the park, although obviously we took care to minimize her contact with other dogs.