Waiter! There’s a Beagle in my soup!

We hadn’t had Beanie long before we discovered that if we failed to push any chairs tight into the kitchen table, she’d jump onto them and survey the exciting contents of the table top. As she got bigger and stronger, she graduated from snatching brief moments “at table” to actually being “on table”.

We really, really did our best to discourage this by always picking her up, saying “Off” firmly and lowering her back to the floor, but she’s never got the message. Or to be more accurate, she knows that table mountaineering is naughty but… “it’s there” and a Beagle’s got to do what a Beagle’s got to do, etc.

Well, things got markedly worse recently when she scaled the summit and managed to snatch a few scraps of steak pie. It was yummy. Very, very yummy. Since then, she’s learned how to make it to the table top with a lightning fast two stage jump. She sneaks round to the side and leaps onto your thigh. Then, without even the slightest delay, she uses your leg as a springboard for a second jump onto the table surface. Once there she knows she’s got at most a couple of seconds before one of us grabs her, so speed is of the essence. She singles out her target and consumes it with the desperation of an escaped convict.

Even when you get hold of her, the game’s not over. You leave your chair to pop her back on the ground, and now you’re in a race. Can you get your bum back on the chair before there’s a Beanie on it? Quite often the answer is No and you end up sitting on a Beagle cushion. And that’s no fun, because Beagle cushions are noisy, wriggly and sometimes bitey.