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.