While poor Beanie’s convalescing at home, it’s now Biggles’ turn to have fun in the park. Yesterday morning I took him along to have a little play with Beanie’s pals. The “puppy field” is a short distance away from the car park so my plan was to carry him there, taking the most direct route. Of course I’d forgotten how hard it is to go anywhere at a decent pace when you’ve got a Beagle pup in your arms – you get the “aww” reaction from absolutely everyone you meet. Twenty minutes and countless introductions later I finally made it to the field and unleashed my wriggling, excited little bundle of a Beagle.

He ran around saying hello to everyone, whether they had four legs or only two, and was quickly accepted as one of the gang.

Beanie’s chums Kirby, Zak and Amber all came over to see him, but I think he was just too young to hold their interest for long. He was welcomed very warmly by the other Beagles though. He’d already had a play session with Tess and her two pups Tara and Clara of course, so I fully expected him to play well with them:

What surprised me though was how well he got on with Beanie’s sister Bella. The two hit it it off almost instantly.

For a time he followed her around like a shadow – even when there were interesting things going on elsewhere:

In return she took him under her wing and helped introduce him to other park regulars.

I really think they felt a connection to one another. They both have the same dad so Bella is Biggles’ half-sister. Maybe he saw her as a surrogate Beanie!

Biggles quickly learned that good things can be had from the human types, if you look cute and sit nicely:

though it doesn’t work every time!

He seemed more interested in sniffing and investigating things than Beanie was on her first few outings..

..but just like Beanie, his recall was pretty good, even though he didn’t always run to the right person!

I’m right here Biggles! Er… Biggles…

I also noticed that he’s not as inclined to get into wrestling matches with the other pups as Beanie was at his age. This is I think a good thing, although it was very funny to see Beanie get much, much bigger dogs on their backs.

I kept the outing quite short but Biggles still had a great time.

Hopefully it made up for some of the play sessions he can’t have at home until Beanie’s fully recovered.

If you Google for even a short amount of time, you’ll find plenty of stories about the crazy things dogs have eaten and either passed with some difficulty, or had to have removed surgically. Little Beanie’s a chewaholic, no doubt about that, but she’s always been more into the destructive side of chewing rather than the swallowing. It’s now apparent that has changed, possibly due to the competition for chewables presented by her little brother Biggles. Or maybe she’s from a line of Beagles owned by a certain crazy Frenchman with an unconventional appetite, and her heritage is only now asserting itself. But I’m getting ahead of myself; here’s the whole story.

About a week ago, I spotted Beanie chewing what appeared to be a bit of a “dead” ball in the park. Verbal commands won’t do a thing when she’s got something in her mouth, but she’s very obliging about letting my fingers probe around inside there (she should be, it’s a very regular occurrence), so I kept quiet and headed over to her to extract the object. However, before I reached her she mugged someone for a treat and whatever had been in her mouth wasn’t there any more. I wasn’t too concerned. I figured she’d probably spat out the foreign object to make room for the treat, and even if she had swallowed, the item would have been small, well chewed and therefore likely to pass through without any problems.

The following night (or morning, because it was about 4am) we were woken abruptly by something. I couldn’t see anything in the darkness, but I could hear a repetitive pumping sound. I figured either someone had broken into our house with the express purpose of unblocking our sinks using a stout old fashioned plunger, or one of our dogs was about to be sick. Susan turned the light on, and instead of a masked superhero plumber (“My job here is done, but somewhere in the city a toilet is overflowing. To the Dynorod Van! Away!”) I saw Beanie regurtitating some floppy blue plastic. Fair enough – at least she’d thrown it up before it could do harm.

Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of it, and there was another vomiting session the next night that produced a bit more plastic and a trace amount of blood. We’ve got a history of being panic merchants where our dog’s health is concerned, and true to form we called the pet’s insurance help line, and visited the vet. As Beanie was otherwise in top form and making regular deposits in the Poo Bank (the only bank not threatened by the current global economic crisis) the advice was to monitor the situation for the next few days.

As it turned out, the vomiting recurred intermittently, so of course we returned to the vet. We knew the next course of action our vet would offer would be exploratory surgery, but Susan found a less invasive alternative – endoscopy, which was available at the Glasgow Vet College. We dropped her off there first thing this morning, and gave Biggles a little offlead park walk while we waited for news. I was confident the vet would find nothing, and we’d be taking our (temporarily) biggest pup back home cursing ourselves for over reacting yet again. There’d been no vomiting the last two nights, and even the folks at the vet college had felt that an endoscopy was probably unwarranted; they decided to go with an xray and ultrasound first.

This time however we’d been right to reach for the shiny red Bat-phone. The xray and ultrasound revealed a substantial amount of foreign material in Beanie’s stomach, and the endoscopy was back on. A little later, the endoscope found a lump of whitish material that it could not extract, and finally surgery retrieved a treasure trove of junk: six large pieces of grey guttering(!), assorted pieces of plastic, enough wool and fabric fragments to knit a jumper, and a cat’s claw.

Blimey. Where the hell did she get all this stuff? Especially the cat’s claw! When there’s a cat in the neighbourhood, Beanie much prefers to have any possibility of a confrontation spoiled by a stout garden fence. That way she can woof boldly without any fear of reprisals. I’m just hoping the vet will keep samples of Beanie’s non-degistibles so that we can work out where they came from, and prevent any further illict speed swallowing attempts.

Regardless, our pup is apparently recovering well from her op and we should get her back tomorrow. No doubt she’ll have to wear a lampshade for a few days to stop her messing with her stitches. I hope it’s a big one, otherwise she just might swallow it.

Squeaky toys have had a bad time in the park lately. Beanie’s chewed a few to destruction, and so has her Labradoodle pal Amber. Yesterday however a new species of toy was spotted in the park – the rare and shockingly expensive double-bladdered chicken. It was a big hit with Zak, who despite his size is surprisingly gentle with toys.

The double-lining is supposed to make it more resilient to power-chewers, and it was certainly put to the test when Amber got hold of it!

Once the obligatory chasing was done…

…Beanie also got in on the tugging action, but she didn’t get a chance to run off with the toy for a serious one-on-one chewathon. Perhaps that’s the real reason the chicken was still able to squeak as it left the park.

Beanie’s little brother Biggles is going to have some serious fun of his own tonight. Now that he’s fully vaccinated, he can go to his very first puppy training class. The class is more about socialisation than training, so he’s going to be meeting lots of other youngsters in a safe, clean environment. Well.. it’ll start off clean, but I suspect our excitable little boy will leave his mark on the floor before the night is over!