Beanie and Biggles have often used their tugging abilities to stretch one of my socks until it’s big enough fit a seven foot tall basketball player, and now they’ve tugged and tugged at their blog until it too has grown in size. This is a good thing because the little details of their adventures can now be seen more readily, though sadly until someone invents scratch and sniff computers, the smells are still left to the viewer’s imagination.

Speaking of smells, our vet probably raided the supermarket shelves for air fresheners after Beanie’s most recent visit. We took her in for a check up when she suffered a complete loss of appetite following an otherwise minor bout of sickness. As usual Beanie came away with a variety of costly pills and potions for a condition that would most likely have cleared up on its own, but during the course of the examination the vet spotted that her anal glands were kind of full and immediately set about emptying them. Now I’m well aware that anal gland secretions can be pretty foul; I’ve got a t-shirt that received a sample of Biggles’ botty juice and after two washes it still doesn’t smell right. What’s more, Susan has had a go at “milking” Biggles’ glands using the external method and that was pretty bad too, but until that vet visit we’d never witnessed a full purging of the glands using the finger-in-the-bum-hole method. The Beanie juice came out faster than expected, soiled the examination table, and within seconds filled the entire room with an aroma so gross that only the the Scots term “boufing” comes close to describing it. I’d had a roll and sausage not half an hour before and I’m telling you, it was a struggle to keep it down.

It’s never a good idea to get your nose this close to a Beagle bum hole, regardless of whether said Beagle’s anal glands have been recently expressed or not!

Anyway I’ve no idea whether the treatment helped hasten Beanie’s recovery, but in the space of 24 hours she was back to her food-stealing, tea-drinking ways and we were able to take her and Biggles out on a walk together again. For a change of scenery we decided to try out one of the trails around Dundonald castle, and to our surprise we got to enjoy a woodland walk of the length and quality that we’d normally find only in major country parks many miles away from home. We only explored a fraction of the trail, but what ground we did cover was sniffed very thoroughly and enthusiastically by our pups!

A fallen tree presents no obstacle to a pair of intrepid adventurers, even if they are a bit on the short side!

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It’s hard to believe it, but the Beanster is four years old today. There’s a touch of grey creeping in around her face now, but most people who meet her for the first time assume she’s still a puppy and that Biggles is the oldest in our pack. That’s due in part to an endearing trait she’s retained from her time as a zero-year-old: a smile-inducing full body wag that breaks out the instant a friendly face approaches her. These days that wag sometimes has a cynical motive behind it though; it invariably causes the approaching human to bend down to pet Beanie, placing pockets and/or shopping at the perfect height for a lightening fast raid. She hasn’t made any big scores this way of late though, for which I’m grateful, because trips to the vet to induce vomiting don’t come cheap!

Beanie’s new found maturity has changed her in a number of ways. For example, she’s recently acquired a taste for tea. Whenever a hot new beverage appears on the scene she feigns sleep, waiting for it to cool. Then, the instance it’s left unguarded there’s a Beanie snout in the cup and the lapping and slurping noises begin.

She’s also become much more tolerant of affection. In the past, any attempt to cuddle or kiss her would result in her scarpering almost immediately. Now, she frequently presents her cheeks for kisses on a morning when we open the crates and let our two into bed with us for snuggle time. Biggles presents his cheeks too, but more often than not it’s the rear ones and I’m not so keen on kissing them.

So, how does a Beagle princess celebrate her fourth birthday? Well today was a very low key affair. She accompanied us on a shopping trip to Ayr (Mountain Warehouse in Ayr actually allows dogs inside the shop) and on the way back to the car she cleaned the streets of just about every discarded chip and lunchtime sandwich. Later she had  a couple of madcap chases round the garden..

practiced her treat-catching skills..

and devoured a tasty pigs ear. So, not bad, but not great either. The thing she doesn’t realize yet is, the real birthday treatment is coming tomorrow and over the next few days..