Our four Beaglets have become much more of a pack in recent weeks. To encourage this we’ve been making a point of walking them all together once a day, even if oly one humie is available for the walk – that’s right: one pair of hands holding four leads. The first time I did this I really struggled to keep the leads from tangling; it was bit like a Maypole dance in which all the participants were on a sugar high. Just as I was starting to get the hang of it, an unexpected aspect of Beagle pack behaviour manifested itself. I guess you could call it the poo domino effect: all it takes is for one pack member (usually Biggles) to drop his furry pants and deposit a bottom-sausage, and suddenly all the other pack members feel compelled to do the same.

If walking four Beagles is difficult, dealing with four consecutive poo events while walking them is like trying to thread a needle while wearing boxing gloves. The moment that first poo hits the deck, Poppy and Monkey are desperate to get a bite of it, so I pull everyone away from the drop zone and transfer all the leads to one hand while trying to extract and open a poo bag. When all is ready, I misdirect the youngsters just long enough to lunge at the poo and scoop it up. Ideally the next poo in the sequence would happen right at this point, while there’s room in the open bag, but that’s not how it plays out. Nope, the next squat only happens once I’ve tied up the poo bag, untangled the Gordian knot of leads and just got everyone moving in the right direction again. Worse still, lately Biggles and Monkey seem to be in a competition to find out who can do the most dumps on a walk, so it’s not just four poos I have to deal with but sometimes eight or nine.

I don’t want to dent Biggles’ ego, but when it comes to sheer quantity of dumpage, Monkey holds the record due to the crazy amount of food he needs to fuel his growth.

A question I often get asked on walks is how well our four dogs get on, given the considerable age gap. I would say that Beanie & Biggles have accepted Poppy completely; she’s absolutely one of the team and knows all our little rituals, from treats at the kitchen baby gate to the mad race to crates when it’s bed time. With Monkey, things are more complicated; he’s very much accepted on walks and there are very rarely any clashes in the garden, but in the house he can still be on the receiving end of a stern telling off. Very often these admonishments are deserved; Monkey has more nonsense between his ears than even Biggles, and he’s hopeless at understanding where the red lines lie. That said, it’s easy to forget that despite his size (he’s almost the same size as Biggles now)  inside he’s still just a baby.  This is never more evident than when he gets a treat he hasn’t tried before; he plays with it for ages before attempting to chew it, and it never occurs to him that as he throws it around and rolls on it that any of our other three doglets – Poppy included – could steal it from him. He’s just a big, blundering, lovable oaf with all the common sense of a brain damaged lemming. Give him time and I’m sure he’ll progress to the same level of awareness and intelligence as Biggles (let’s face it we don’t want to set the bar too high).

Dad, there was a hole in the bottom of our padded play kennel, so I stuck my head through it. It may not have been one of my better decisions.

Another question – one we ask of ourselves from time to time – is whether we did the right thing by getting Poppy and Monkey while Beanie and Biggles are still with us. The answer has always come back “yes”, but increasingly this answer comes more quickly and with more confidence. I honestly believe that our older pups have gained more than they’ve lost, and perhaps the biggest gain is in the nature of our interactions with them. As they’ve aged and Beanie in particular has shown signs of frailty, the knowledge that we must eventually lose them has been ever harder to suppress, and they must have sensed our feelings. Instead of making the most of whatever time we have left with them, we were in danger of spending their last years or months listening fearfully to that relentless clock ticking down. Having Poppy and Monkey has dulled the worry and made it much easier just to take each day as it comes; that must surely be a benefit to our original pair of woofers.