Every now and then armchair / donut-bed astronauts get a chance to be part of a space adventure. To date Beanie and Biggles have: sent their names to Mars aboard the Curiosity Rover, gone on a round trip to an asterioid called Bennu, and staked a claim on a small bit of Mars real estate. Now at 16 and 15 years of age respectively, they’re getting bundled up and sent off to Jupiter to snoop on its moon Europa aboard NASA’s latest probe. If you’d like to send your Beagles to Europa too (and let’s face it, we could all occasionally do with a little break from relentless Beagle naughtiness, right?) you can do so for free, but do it soon because the entry window closes at the end of this year:

https://europa.nasa.gov/message-in-a-bottle/sign-on/

It’s probably very silly and sentimental, but I love the idea that some little memento of my pups will be hanging around in space long after they’ve gone on their final, biggest adventure. That said, given the way they motored up Loudoun Hill just recently I think that last big adventure could be some way off.

Despite being older they handled the hill rather better than on their last visit, requiring no assistance whatsoever, not even a bit of hand-on-bottom boosting. We’re putting this apparent rejuvenation down to a combination of daily servings of “golden paste” (turmeric in olive oil with either black pepper or cider vinegar to aid absorption) and fish. We know that golden paste is an effective anti-inflammatory, but one with almost no side-effects. I say “almost” because the tips of Beanie’s ears have started to turn a bit yellow. This is not due to any systemic effect, it’s just that she can’t stop her lugs from dipping into her bowl at mealtimes, and that turmeric stuff leaves yellow stains on absolutely blummin’ everything.

Biggles has apparently been feeling so youthful that he’s been showing signs of wanting to play with Monkey. As there are 13 years between them age-wise and Monkey is also bigger and around 5 kilos heavier than Biggles, we’ve prevented any play from actually happening. Still, I’m not entirely convinced that it’s Biggles that we’d have to worry about if they started a bit of roughhousing.

Back when Monkey was a pup he tried to goad Biggles into a chase; Biggles playfully responded with a shoulder-barge, just as he’s always done to Beanie. The expression on Monkey’s little face screamed “Get me out of here, he’s a nutter!”. It was a bit like a young rocker challenging Ozzy Osbourne to a wild night of partying. Yes, Ozzy is old and has the shakes, but he’s still Ozzy.

Take my advice Monkey: if it’s robust play you’re after, you’ll be a lot safer sticking with the Popster.

As I mentioned in a previous post Poppy has epilepsy, or as we prefer to call it: “yawning and falling over syndrome”.

Note: the above is just a spoiled little girly stretching out on her double-decker donut bed, and not a depiction of an epileptic seizure.

Currently she’s only had a handful of seizures, but the period between them is decreasing and the time will probably come when she’ll be a candidate for anti-epilepsy drugs. Having looked at the stats for this kind of medication, we’re very keen to avoid it. The chances of quality-of-life lowering side-effects are high, while there is by no means any guarantee that the drugs will work (they’re ineffective in about 30% of cases). On top of that, conventional anti-epilepsy treatment is very expensive; it’s not just the drugs that cost, it’s the vet consultations and the blood tests required to catch any early signs of liver damage and other issues that can be caused by the drugs.

Instead we’ve decided to go for the least damaging courses of action first to see if they can tame Poppy’s seizures. Specifically we’re doing the following:

• Keeping a daily diary to help us spot any seizure triggers or patterns.
• Working hard on keeping the house calm and stress-free. Stress is a known trigger for epilepsy in both dogs and humans.
• Golden paste: this turmeric/black pepper mixture is known to have anti-inflammatory properties which may mitigate against any damage caused by the seizures, and may even help prevent seizures.
• Changes to feeding habits: thus far all of Poppy’s seizures have happened when she’s been quite a long time since her last meal. We’re therefore giving her four meals a day, hopefully smoothing out the peaks and troughs in her energy levels.
• Ocular Compression – manual vagus nerve stimulation as a means to head off seizures as they’re about to start, or at least bring Poppy out of a seizure as quickly as possible. Perhaps it can also be used in a preventative capacity; we’re unsure about this at present.
• Dietary changes.

That last one is the most complicated measure, but also the one with the most promise. At first we switched her to Purina Neurocare, a kibble which claims to be a keto diet, and one which contains a relatively small percentage of MCT oil  – a substance which has helped epileptic dogs in some studies.  We didn’t feel good about keeping Poppy on this however; for one thing, the ingredients list reads like something you’d find in the worst example of human junk food, and for another, the MCT concentration has presumably been lowered to make it palatable to the widest range of dogs.

We have therefore taken the plunge and designed Poppy’s very own diet with a higher concentration of MCT and a number of other features that show promise for the control of epilepsy: plenty of vitamin D3,  a better balance of omega 3 versus omega 6, a lower GI profile, and of course mostly natural ingredients. This is no small undertaking; there’s a lot more to it than just picking out a few homecooked doggy meals from the web and if you get it wrong, there can be serious long term health consequences. On top of that, it is of course a long term commitment involving frequent cook-ups and preparation of servings.

Poppy got very bored and sleepy during the many hours of research and head-scratching needed to create her posh nosh, but we have finally come up with a diet that ticks all the boxes without costing the earth.

Now it’s done, she really likes how it tastes and particularly loves the four-times-a-day feeding regimen. Prior to the change in her diet, she was a lazy stop-in-bed, but now she’s up and out of her crate the moment we open it on a morning, and heads straight to the kitchen with a very spritely little trot that says “Hey everyone get out of my way, a little princess is going to the kitchen for her pre-breakfast breakfast.” At night she tries to convince me that it’s time for her bedtime serving even though there’s still at least 30 minutes to go. I thought Beagles had pretty accurate internal clocks, but hers always seems to be running a bit fast! Come to think of it, that kind of reminds me of a certain other little princess in our family.

HRH The Beanster

HRH The Pipsqueak

Right now we have no idea how all this is going to go, but however it turns out at least we’ll know we really did our best to preserve our little girl’s quality of life.

Now he’s two years old, what kind of young man has Monkey become? Well for one thing he’s certainly our most entertaining Beagle by a country mile. Toss a treat to any of our other Beagles and it’ll be speed-swallowed in less than a second; toss a treat to Monkey, and you’re in for an intense 10 minute play session as he throws it in the air, rolls on it, pretends to pounce on it and basically does everything imaginable with it, except for actually eating it. In fact sometimes he gets so carried away that one of our other Beagles comes along and swipes it from right under his nose.

Aside from the ears and the other overtly doggy characteristics, he looks a lot like a little human boy when he’s got a toy. He really seems to use his imagination as he plays, throwing his toy in the air and then looking away as it lands so that he can pretend that it was thrown by some invisible play partner. I really need to catch some video of him in full flow because I’ve never seen a dog being so inventive as they play.

Monkey is an incredibly gentle, sensitive little soul who is also a complete klutz. For some reason he’s decided that he should never jump onto a sofa in the conventional, front-facing way. Instead he sneaks up by the side of the sofa and leaps up from there, often without knowing if anyone or anything is occupying his landing spot. More than once he’s landed right on my groin – all 18kg of him slamming down paws first onto my joy department – and when I let out an involuntary cry he immediately jumps back onto the floor, clearly very distressed that he’s hurt me. Yes, I actually have to go reassure and apologize to him for reacting when he power-punches my balls. By contrast, whenever Beanie & Biggles hear the sound of a humie in pain they usually raid that humie’s pockets on the assumption that the humie is temporarily less able to fend them off.

I don’t think anyone would describe Monkey as brave – not unless they think that discretion isn’t just the better part of valour, but actually the only part of valour worth considering. While passing other dogs that aren’t quite so friendly Monkey nearly always drops back and puts me between him and the grumpy woofer. Perhaps he took my cautionary words to heart when he was a pup: whenever he approached a sleeping Beanie I would tell him that “there are old Monkeys and there are bold Monkeys, but there are no old bold Monkeys”. I think he’s definitely going for the “old Monkey” life choice.

There is however one less savoury aspect to his personality that I feel I must mention: he’s a raging pervert. In a previous post I already described how he seems to be infatuated with the Beanster despite the massive and inappropriate age gap, but now he’s become obsessed with sniffing any surface that has recently had a bottom on it. It doesn’t matter whether that bottom belonged to a Beagle or a human; if the bottom had an anus and it recently vacated a seat or bed, he’s going to drop whatever he’s doing and go sniff for… well I’m not sure what he’s sniffing for but it doesn’t seem normal to me. That Monkey boy of ours just has no sense of propriety!

Nevertheless Happy Birthday Monkey! Let’s hope you make it to your third birthday without getting arrested!