Every morning in our house starts with a bang. Several bangs in fact, typically around six o’clock in the morning. These bangs are Beanie pounding her paw against the front of her crate; her way of telling us she wants to be let into our bed. Once she’s in there our sleep remains disturbed as she repeatedly changes her mind about whether to be above or below the covers, or tries to shove one of us out so she can lie horizontally. When we finally give in and commit to getting up, we then have to deal with her brother, Biggles.

Biggles has an entirely different morning routine. The moment you approach his crate he rolls over onto his back, and refuses to get out until his tummy has been sufficiently tickled. At least I assume it’s a tummy tickle he’s after. I suppose it could also be his first waking reaction to the lethal fumes his little bottom has been generating all night. Either way, you have to kneel there and tickle away for a couple of minutes until he emerges, then quickly usher him downstairs and out into the garden before he’s tempted to use the Beagle en-suite (the left hand side of our chest of drawers) for his first pee of the day.

Here’s my first attempt to capture the Biggles part of the routine on video. I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the clip; I’m not too good with the camera that early in the morning, the light level is very poor, and those Biggles fumes are quite potent:

Of course the fact that I was filming piqued Beanie’s interest, and when Beanie’s on the move Biggles always follows suit, so this is a much shortened version of the morning ticklefest.

For the last four days we’ve been taking a tag-team approach to our park walks; I give Beanie an offlead session while Susan takes Biggles for an on-lead walk involving lots of recall training and games. About half-way through we swap, so Biggles gets some offlead time and Beanie gets training and a good sniffabout. The main reason for this change was to curb the wanderlust they get when they’re together ( especially now Biggles is in the particularly troublesome 5-8 month period when recall takes a nosedive). It may also put a stop to the pack behaviour they’d been displaying when playing with other dogs, which though harmless in itself did seem to incite the others to naughtiness and squabbling.

So far it’s working well for both of them. Instead of relying solely on each other for entertainment they’re having to play with other dogs.

Beanie’s back to chasing with other dogs, which keeps her safely in the field

.. and she’s loving every minute of it

For some reason it’s suddenly become a lot easier to get them playing with us outdoors too. Maybe it’s the extra obedience training we’re doing with them each night, or maybe we’ve finally found the right toys. Beanie just loves her treat-filled tennis ball, and is getting much better at bringing it back to me so I can liberate the goodies inside. She’s perfectly capable of getting them out herself, and sometimes does, but I think she prefers the excitement of grabbing them as I shake them out of the ball. Biggles on the other hand doesn’t really have patience for the treat ball; his passion is for Air Kong squeaky tennis balls. Sophie had some when they played together recently, and they made such an impression on him that Susan made a special trip out to the pet shop to get some. It takes a little effort to get him interested in them at the start of his off-lead session, but once he’s had one in his mouth and heard it squeak, he’s hooked.

He’s even getting quite good at bringing them back to me for a treat and so I can throw them again

A beagle genuinely interested in ball games – it really is possible!

So far we haven’t had any major incidents of them running way off out of sight, though there have been moments when one or the other of them has thought about it…

..but they only go so far, then come running right back for a treat. I think the on-lead recall training is a big part of that, and it kind of fits with the training that working pack Beagles receive. When a newbie is old enough to join the pack, he/she is apparently chained to one of the more experienced dogs, so they have no choice but follow the commands of the hunt leaders. After a while the behavior becomes almost hard-wired.

I’m also happy to report that Biggles seems to have got over the shock he had when the demon sausage came to visit, and he’s starting to lose his puppy looks and turn into a fine, confident young boy.

A heroic pose, but notice he’s still got his squeaky ball in his mush!

Meanwhile Beanie’s agility and obedience training is going from strength to strength. Susan took her for another session in the agility barn this week to work on issuing commands from a greater distance. It’s the only way to go; it was obvious from the previous session that Beanie was having to slow down or even pause to wait for direction from Susan. Two legs just can’t keep up with Beanie’s turbo-charged four-leg drive! Having said that, giving well timed and clear directions isn’t easy when you’re no longer seeing the course from the same orientation as your dog..

The four of us, and particularly Biggles, just had a rather shocking experience. For the sake of public decency there aren’t any photos of the actual event, but please note this post contains content of an adult nature and depictions of profound psychological trauma.

Biggles just had a monstrous erection. You know the tedious bits in the Bible where there’s a whole lot of begatting? Well by the look of his equipment Biggles could have done it all himself and still been finished in time for supper. Here’s the whole 18-rated story.

The morning started with a great park session. The last couple of days we’ve been walking them separately because when they’re together, they run off on a great adventure that gives us the willies really stresses us out. It works like this: I give Beanie some offlead running for a bit while Susan gives Biggles an on-lead walkabout, then we swap. Anyway, this morning Beanie had some good chases with Rannoch and Sophie, and in his offlead session Biggles actually took the lead in a brilliant chase with Penny, Rannoch, Sophie and others. The two of them had a great time, didn’t run off, and came back ready for a good nap in their crates. Perfect.

Around lunchtime I could see them stirring, so I let them out, took them downstairs for a loo break, then put them in their “run” outside our office. As I sat at my PC typing away, I could hear a bit of argy-bargy going on. This is normal, and in many ways welcome because in our house silence may be golden, but it’s nearly always naughty too. Well, about fifteen minutes later things went quiet, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Biggles standing motionless on the other side of the baby gate. I got up to check things out.

Biggles was not a happy chappy. He looked kind of hunched, his tail was down, and he had a bewildered expression on his face. Beanie was in her basket, watching him intently, apparently concerned. Had he injured himself during play somehow? I studied him for a few seconds, and then my eyes locked on something that didn’t belong in this picture. In fact the only place it would belong is in a really explicit porn movie. I didn’t actually measure it, but we’re talking easily four inches of angry red sausage. It didn’t look right to me. I’ve seen dogs having a horny moment before, but this.. this was unnatural. I called Susan over for a look but she wasn’t keen on getting anywhere near it. “He’s a boy, you’re boy, it’s your job.”

I watched quietly for a moment to see if London Bridge was about to fall down, but it seemed quite intent on holding it’s current position. Given all the health scares we’ve had with Beanie, there was one obvious course of action. Susan picked up the phone and called the 24hr helpline that comes with Biggles’ insurance. The conversation that followed was… difficult, for want of a better word. But the veterinary nurse on the other end of the line assured us that it was normal, although given his age, Biggles was probably quite a highly sexed little boy. By the time the call was over, Biggles’ monstrous member had retracted and the panic was over. Shortly afterwards he fell into a deep sleep in his basket, adopting his usual position:

One mystery remains of course: what caused Biggles to have this Mother of All Erections in the first place? Well I can only guess it was Beanie. You see for some time their play has involved Biggles humping Beanie’s head while she twangs his joy department. It’s a painful thing to watch, but not half as painful as seeing that monstrosity this afternoon. I think the four of us are going to need therapy to recover from this one.