Some fourteen years ago when we drove down south to pick up little 7 week old Biggles, his breeder saw the locking bolts on our crate and asked if our then 10 month old Beanie girl had worked out how to defeat them yet. I replied that she hadn’t, and in fact she still hasn’t even with 15 years to work on them. I remember thinking there’s no way a Beagle could ever operate a bolt lock like that. Since then of course I’ve seen many videos of Beagles – and some other dogs – working out how to do things that are normally the preserve of humans and maybe other animals equipped with opposable thumbs.. like apes.. and monkeys. Well, we have  got a Monkey, and he’s suddenly developed the ability to do this:

To be fair Biggles has opened similar doors in our house a couple of times, but only by accident; he’s never understood the role of the handle and how to operate it. As you can see from the video, Monkey has that down completely. He looks at the handle, and with one purposeful and confident movement of his paw, he opens the door. It’s quite spooky being on the other side of a door that he’s trying to open.. a bit like this:

If I lean on the door to keep it closed, he keeps on turning that handle, puzzled and frustrated by the fact that door hasn’t opened yet. As entertaining as his new ability is, it has created problems because we only have so many baby gates, and there are plenty of things in our rooms that don’t need an ever-inquisitive, unsupervised Monkey trying to reveal their innermost secrets. Even worse, he’s managed to open the front door – which opens inwards – and take himself and Poppy for a (thankfully brief and uneventful) tour of our front garden. To that end, I disappeared into my shed for an hour one day and came up with this:

It’s crude I grant you – I haven’t even sanded and painted any of the three such units I’ve made – but they are proving effective at blocking Monkey’s handle-operating abilities.

On a different note, we recently had an unusually early and sustained frost.  Weather forecasts kept getting it very wrong, predicting zero or maybe minus one on nights where the temperature actually dropped to around -9 Celsius. That’s nothing compared to what the “bomb cyclone” has brought to the US of course, but it’s still been unusually cold for us at this point in the year.

I’m not sure what this is Poppy

But it’s very slippy

As cold as the thermometers told me those days were, they had nothing on the fast-freeze we experienced yesterday morning in the wind and rain. Windchill is something that Scotland does very well and though the Beaglets still enjoyed their romp on the beach, they were nearly as relieved as me when it was over and we got back to the van. The instant I opened the door (I would have got Monkey to do that for me, but he’s still working on using keys), everyone piled into Biggles’ travel crate. Everyone that is except Biggles himself, who was left outside, unable to squeeze himself in past the other three Beagles (well, two-and-a-half given Poppy’s diminutive size), all still wearing their soaking wet harnesses and leads. It took ages for me to extract them and dispatch each of them to their own crates, and still longer to get my chilled fingers working enough to drive us back home!