Just like humans, older dogs can lose their faculties. This is easy to spot in the case of well-trained, super-obedient dogs like the various shepherd breeds, but things become less clear when you’re dealing with aging Beagles. In recent years Susan and I have often discussed whether Beanie & Biggles are losing their hearing, or having senior moments.

For example, Susan might ask “What if Beanie is going deaf, and you call her when she’s off-lead on the beach and she doesn’t come?”

My response to that was typically “And how would that be any different to how she’s been most of her life?”

It’s true; Beanie & Biggles have been masters of the art of selective deafness for a long time. And on the subject of acting confused, well if you ask me Biggles has spent his whole life being confused. Now however even I have to admit to seeing concrete signs that our oldsters are starting to lose it proper. Last year Beanie was completely and mercifully untroubled by the whizzbangs of local firework displays, and for the last few months there’s been no reaction from either of them if I’m snacking on peanuts and one falls unobserved to clatter on our laminate floor. More recently, they’ve both become easily startled, even by each other. Just this morning Biggles was snoozing in our bed when Beanie decided she wanted to be in there too. Somehow she completely missed the fact that he was present, and she trampled over him. He woke up with a start and things suddenly got all growly and snarly. This sort of thing has happened a few times now; the first time was shocking but now I just pull them apart and tell them both to calm down and put their teeth back in.

Slightly more amusing is when Beanie or Biggles stride purposefully out of the lounge, then wander the hall for minutes at a time apparently unable to remember why they went out there in the first place. Actually I do that a lot too. Come to think of it I do that most days, but at least I always remember when I’ve set out on an urgent mission to the toilet. Unlike my oldest boy, I’ve never got so confused that I drop my trousers and take a dump on the floor.

On the subject of just doing things wherever you happen to be, Poppy has already submitted her entry for Laziest Vomit Of 2023. She was cosied up on the far end of our leather sofa, and when the stomach plunger started up it was Big Vom Dot Com all over the arm and seat; she couldn’t even be bothered to jump down onto the rug and trot over to the most light colored patch that would show off the vomit to best effect. By contrast, she does always jump off the sofa when she’s dealt a particularly vile fart, but then everybody gets off the sofa when Poppy drops one. She’s got me and both Beagle boys thoroughly beaten when it comes to air poop pungency.

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!