This post is a bit late, but it took me ages to get all our Christmas photos processed. Christmas 2022 marks our first year with four Beagles.

It’s a year that’s seen us put more baby gates and blocks of carefully cut 2 x 4 blocks on our doors (Monkey control), a livestock fence around our vegetable garden (Monkey and Poppy) and criss-cross wires on every aperture in that fence (Poppy specifically, ‘cos she’s so small and wiggly). We’ve also had to move the indoor wood stores for our stove, because they’re even chewier than hooves, and order 12kg bags of dog food at a rate 2 per month because Poppy’s stomach is such a bottomless pit compared to Monkey, who could survive on the fluff in your pocket for a week (or maybe I’ve got that the wrong way round). It’s also the year in which Biggles’s voice has gone all soprano while Beanie can do a decent impersonation of Frau Farbissina from the Austin Powers movies.

Guess how many times I have to untangle leads on a typical walk!
Whatever number you came up with, it’s more than that.

What Christmas 2022 moment sticks in my memory the most? Oddly it’s Poppy getting her Christmas dinner. Ordinarily when you give one of our Beagles something really, really nice in their bowls the wagging stops, concentration goes to maximum and there’s a silence so intense it’s almost deafening. The heads go down into the bowls and don’t come back up until those bowls are so clean that not even a scanning electronic microscope could find any residual food molecules. Poppy’s approach was very different: she nosed each component of the meal, then carefully lifted her roasted potato out onto  the deck, followed by the turkey, then after a moment of deliberation began munching through her brussels sprouts. You could almost hear her internal dialogue:

“Oooh what have I got? Potato – oh yeah I like those, I’ll save that until later. And Turkey, that’ll be nice, I’ll have it after my potato. Sprouts – yes I’ll have those now and wash them down with a quick slurp of gravy”

Needless to say Monkey finished his nosh in record time, and  was then faced with a terrible moral dilemma. His bowl was empty, while Poppy’s still had stuff in it. Would it really be so naughty to nick a bit of his sister’s food?  A few times he looked back and forth between his bowl and Poppy’s and then looked at Susan as if to ask her permission. Said permission was not given of course, so there was a bit of “OooooWoooWooo” (aka “It’s so unfair!!”). That’s Monkeycide folks. Again. Even at Christmas.

The shots:

Happy New Year to everyone and their woofers!

Some fourteen years ago when we drove down south to pick up little 7 week old Biggles, his breeder saw the locking bolts on our crate and asked if our then 10 month old Beanie girl had worked out how to defeat them yet. I replied that she hadn’t, and in fact she still hasn’t even with 15 years to work on them. I remember thinking there’s no way a Beagle could ever operate a bolt lock like that. Since then of course I’ve seen many videos of Beagles – and some other dogs – working out how to do things that are normally the preserve of humans and maybe other animals equipped with opposable thumbs.. like apes.. and monkeys. Well, we have  got a Monkey, and he’s suddenly developed the ability to do this:

To be fair Biggles has opened similar doors in our house a couple of times, but only by accident; he’s never understood the role of the handle and how to operate it. As you can see from the video, Monkey has that down completely. He looks at the handle, and with one purposeful and confident movement of his paw, he opens the door. It’s quite spooky being on the other side of a door that he’s trying to open.. a bit like this:

If I lean on the door to keep it closed, he keeps on turning that handle, puzzled and frustrated by the fact that door hasn’t opened yet. As entertaining as his new ability is, it has created problems because we only have so many baby gates, and there are plenty of things in our rooms that don’t need an ever-inquisitive, unsupervised Monkey trying to reveal their innermost secrets. Even worse, he’s managed to open the front door – which opens inwards – and take himself and Poppy for a (thankfully brief and uneventful) tour of our front garden. To that end, I disappeared into my shed for an hour one day and came up with this:

It’s crude I grant you – I haven’t even sanded and painted any of the three such units I’ve made – but they are proving effective at blocking Monkey’s handle-operating abilities.

On a different note, we recently had an unusually early and sustained frost.  Weather forecasts kept getting it very wrong, predicting zero or maybe minus one on nights where the temperature actually dropped to around -9 Celsius. That’s nothing compared to what the “bomb cyclone” has brought to the US of course, but it’s still been unusually cold for us at this point in the year.

I’m not sure what this is Poppy

But it’s very slippy

As cold as the thermometers told me those days were, they had nothing on the fast-freeze we experienced yesterday morning in the wind and rain. Windchill is something that Scotland does very well and though the Beaglets still enjoyed their romp on the beach, they were nearly as relieved as me when it was over and we got back to the van. The instant I opened the door (I would have got Monkey to do that for me, but he’s still working on using keys), everyone piled into Biggles’ travel crate. Everyone that is except Biggles himself, who was left outside, unable to squeeze himself in past the other three Beagles (well, two-and-a-half given Poppy’s diminutive size), all still wearing their soaking wet harnesses and leads. It took ages for me to extract them and dispatch each of them to their own crates, and still longer to get my chilled fingers working enough to drive us back home!

Remember this little gem from Futurama?

Just like Zoidberg, Monkey has been encouraging various items to surrender their mysteries to him.

The mysteries within this toy have been fully surrendered, and they were mostly white and fluffy.

Unlike Zoidberg, Monkey hasn’t even considered the possibility of fixing things after it all goes wrong.

Monkey seeks comfort from the donut beds as toy-killer’s remorse starts to bite

Thus far toys have been the main subject of Monkey’s investigations, but he is starting to branch out; the inner bits of Biggles’ bed are now the outer bits, and our clothes airer did not fare well when he had a short but intense one-to-one with it . We’ve been through all this before with Beanie and Biggles of course, but neither of them were half as good at opening cupboards, babygates and doors as Monkey. It’s scary how quickly he’s learning to do things, but perhaps his biggest achievement is the regurgitation of a fully intact dog jobby onto our lounge rug. Note that I said “fully intact” there; any Beagle can vomit up a partially digested poop (or “shitvom”, to use the correct term) but puking up a complete bottom sausage takes next-level skill, and Monkey has it.

Poppy has been developing her skills too. She’s recently discovered that she’s small enough to squeeze through some the gaps in the sheep fencing of our inner garden. I’ve been criss-crossing wires over the larger apertures to keep her out, but she’s still getting past them somehow. It’s beginning to look like there aren’t many things that can keep Poppy out!

Beanie can’t seem to decide whether she’s an old crotchety lady or a little pup who just happens to have a more subtle variant of tricolor paintwork. Her voice has been changing over the past year and now she sounds a bit like singer who’s had too many smokes and neat whiskeys, and she’s more prone to use that voice to show disapproval of other dogs. The combination of her voice and demeanour conjure up the image of an old lady hobbling around, poking things with her walking stick and saying “Nah, I don’t think much of that”. The other day I ‘d just parked up for our beach run and as I sorted out the harnesses I could see a dog and his owner playing football on the grass. Beanie could see it too, and she immediately let her disapproval be known. I coud almost hear the translation for her grumbling: “Outrageous! Look at him running around with a ball like that! He should have his balls off if you ask me! Hormones! That’s the problem.”

And yet despite all the old git grumbling she’s still a very playful little girl who enjoys a game of tug, a sprint on the beach and – more recently – a daily afternoon trip into the garden with Monkey and Poppy for a round of marrowbone rolls. This was something I started to help Beanie grow closer to the pups, and it has stuck, but really I don’t think she even notices that the pups are present – it’s all about the treat. Still it’s great to see her out there getting just as excited as the youngsters.

Well maybe Beanie doesn’t get quite as excited as Poppy!

When she’s not sleeping or pestering me to go out in the garden with Monkey and Poppy, Beanie also likes to roam the house checking up on us, to the extent that she’s earned the nickname Snoopy. Now most dogs probably get curious about what their owners are up to, but with Beanie it’s more intense than that – the snooping has an accusatory feel to it. When I see her watching me I feel I have to explain myself, as though I’ve been caught doing something slightly dodgy by a teacher.

What are you doing dad?

Disgraceful! You wouldn’t have caught me doing that when I was a pup!

I’m keeping my eye on you dad!

By comparison, Biggles has been remarkably trouble-free of late. He snuggles up to me in bed, keeps the neighbours informed about Beagle mealtimes, and regularly presents his tummy for tickling. If there was an award the most well behaved Beagle boy during the kast fortnight, he wouldn’t get it, but he just might be one of the runners up.