Double Howlers

Why is it that so often when Monkey’s having a crisis, the humies around him burst out laughing? To be fair his most recent brush with Monkeycide did have me concerned for a few seconds, until I worked out what was actually going on.

We’d just started our walk, and I noticed that Monkey was really lagging behind, holding himself strangely and not moving normally. It looked like maybe he was in pain, and the way he was hunching up had me thinking that his back was hurting him; there are certainly plenty of Beagles with back problems. I think I said out loud “Oh please no” and then suddenly he sat on the ground in a very lazy puppy sit, as though he was about to scoot, but he didn’t scoot – he just sat there. I bent down to check him out, and then I realised the true cause of his distress. In our part of the world we get a particularly pesky species insect during summer; they don’t bite, but they harass you continually, buzzing away as they circle your head and repeatedly dive-bomb your ears, your nostrils, your eyes, try to get into your mouth and land on you. Once you’ve got a group of these annoying little buggers interested in you, they’ll stick with you for miles and often the only way to get any peace is to kill ’em. The good news is they only seem to be a problem for around six weeks and usually they’re done by mid-July, but this year they’re running late.

As soon as I got close to The Monkster I saw and heard a few of them buzzing round him, but they weren’t interested in his head; instead they were harassing his bum hole. I couldn’t help but laugh, which Monkey didn’t appreciate at all. He gave me a particularly pathetic, hurt look and I could almost hear him say “Oh thanks Dad. Yeah, thanks a lot for laughing at me in the midst of my very serious predicament!”. I took pity on him and tried to swat the flies away as best I could, then Daisy came to help out by trying to catch them. Unlike Beanie before her, Daisy’s actually pretty well tuned for hunting things and I think she nabbed one of them. Regardless, our joint efforts distracted the flies enough to continue on our journey, but of course they kept coming back to do flybys of Monkey’s sensitive exhaust port.

“I know Monkey, I hate them too, but if they stay with us all the way back home I’ll hit the little buggers with spray and we’ll have our revenge!” I said to comfort him, and it did seem to help; he looked back at me gratefully and was decidedly more stoic for the rest of the walk. Those flies did indeed follow us all the way round and right back into our garden, but they’d split by the time I came out of the kitchen armed with fast knockdown spray. Or, just possibly.. Daisy got the lot of ’em!

Yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got flies in my tummy :)

Speaking of Daisy, she’s responsible for the second “howler” of this post, in fact she is the howler. Daisy’s really found her voice this year and she’s not afraid to use it; she’s become almost as vocal as Biggles, always alerting the world to latest infringement  of Beagle Law committed by the neighbors, by delivery guys, and by sheep, cows and birds. Let’s face it pretty much anything can get the howl machine going. In the following video, the very first snippet is on Loudoun hill, and in the very top-left corner you can just see the trigger for the noise pollution: another walker was by the summit trig point and had decided, somewhat oddly, to lay on his back and waggle his feet in the air. After few rounds of verbal abuse he stopped, but of course Daisy didn’t and Monkey kept supporting her even though he clearly had no clue what all the fuss was about!