A while back I wrote that our older pups are more of  a handful than our young ones. That is no longer the case due in no small part to Monkey’s conkers, or as I prefer to call them, his Spherical Ideas Department (SID). It’s plain that they’ve started talking to him – giving all manner of novel and often unwise suggestions – and he’s all ears.

Monkey’s most noteworthy SID-inspired projects include:

• Chowing down on toilet brushes and when apprehended by a humie, insisting on giving said humie a big slobbery kiss (because they really like that second-hand toilet brush juice).
• Stealing poo bags out of my trouser pocket. This in itself is hardly a unique Beagle project, but the skill level Monkey displays with his pick-pocketing is truly remarkable. He’s got a big, clumsy mouth but somehow he can sneak the bags out of my pocket without me feeling a thing. I only realise I’ve been hit when I hear the crinkling as he gets to work on his ill-gotten yet artfully obtained prizes.
• Sticking his head through the livestock fence we’ve erected around our vegetable growing area, and getting stuck.
• Wooing Beanie. This is one of the most dangerous things to come out of the Spherical Ideas Department, not least because the conkers-recommended wooing technique involves slapping Beanie’s head with a big heavy paw. In fairness this hasn’t got Monkey into trouble just yet, but as I keep reminding my boy: “There are old Monkeys and there are bold Monkeys, but there are no old, bold Monkeys that don’t have bite marks on their bottoms.”
• Peeing and pooing in the house. Yes, just as we thought Monkey had put his house-soiling habits to bed, the SID re-awakened them. The first of this new wave of accidents came shortly after I spotted Monkey un-weighting one of his rear legs during a pee. It was the beginning of a leg-cock, so maybe he was experimenting with territory marking; that would explain the peeing, but not the in-house number twos. Regardless, we seem to be getting the house-training back on track now.
• Shoulder-barging Biggles on a walk. Monkey is now – at six months old – bigger and heavier than Biggles(!), but Biggles was right up for a bit of manly shoulder-bumping and instantly responded in kind. This scared the hell out of Monkey, and the shoulder barging project was shelved thereafter. Maybe in his head Monkey still sees himself as a tiny pup, dwarfed and awed by the adult Beagles in his pack. Alternatively, maybe he realized that there’s a reason why Biggles often stands with his rear legs really wide apart: his balls may be virtual rather than physical but they’re enormous, giving the Bigglet a vastly superior Spherical Ideas Department. Competing with that level of silly would be like Justin Bieber trying to break Ozzy Osborne’s records for wrecking hotel rooms.

In spite of all this hormone-inspired silliness, we’ve decided that Monkey will retain his full pocket billiards set; for the most part he’s calmer and easier to handle than Biggles ever was, and not overly confident. Poppy of course has been spayed and never had any conkers to start with, but she’s still capable of coming up with her own naughty ideas. Like Beanie she loves to wreck plants, and when we put plastic green fencing around planting areas to protect them, she made it her mission to nibble her way through it and wreak havoc on the vulnerable seedlings within.

Back when we’d first got Poppy I entertained the idea that she was actually an alien – a Nibblosian from the Plant Nibble who could spawn more Beagles by doing a head stand in a plant pot. She’s now displaying another alien characteristic that could have come straight out of Ridley Scott most famous movie: she’s a face hugger. She likes nothing more than to climb onto a humie shoulder for a cuddle, and once there, cover the humie’s mouth and nose with her head and neck, stifling breathing. Seriously, I don’t think it would be wise to leave Poppy alone in a room with a sleeping baby or someone who wouldn’t be able to push her off their face!

EDIT: My idea of equating Biggles to Ozzy Osborne seems to have been about right. The day after I made this post, we went out to work on the garden without properly closing the kitchen baby gate. Some time later Susan spotted Biggles in the kitchen and sent me in to check on things,  usher him back to the lounge and close the gate. As I stood in the doorway to the kitchen I didn’t see any overt signs of Biggly boy activity, but when I took a step inside I heard a crunching noise underfoot: broken glass. In fact Biggles had knocked two pint-sized glasses onto the floor, smashing them. As I cleaned that up I noticed a Jacobs Cream Cracker wrapper lying in the hall, and found a trail of crumbs all the way up the corridor to the bedroom. Clothes had been thrown around the bedroom floor, and in the ensuite the toilet roll holder had been ripped off the wall, but curiously the toilet roll itself was lying mostly undamaged on the floor. All that would have made for a respectable Ozzy-style wrecking session, but Biggles had left one more surprise for me: in the family bathroom off the hall there was an empty bag of sultanas. As it happened I knew for sure that the bag had been mostly empty prior to Biggles getting it because I’d put a handful of the remaining sultanas on my cereal that morning. No need for an emergency dash to the vet then, but this was nevertheless an impressive path of destruction and chaos for a nearly 14 year old Beagle boy, and it served as proof that even if you have no balls you can still have a spherical ideas department that’s the size of two small planets stuck together.

More shots from the last couple of weeks:

We get all four of our Beagles out together on most walks now, but but from time to time it’s nice to give each pair of furries their own dedicated adventure. A little while back the youngsters got to do a woodland walk in Stewarton, and a week later Beanie and Biggles returned to the Ayr Gorge walk in Mauchline. They’ve done this walk a number of times over the years, and it’s always one they enjoy, with lots of ups and downs and sniffs at every turn. Catch it on a good day in the right season, and it’s truly magical.

One of the signature points on the walk is where the path is framed by two huge old trees, as shown in this shot from one of our previous visits, below.

This is now gone forever; the tree on the left has been felled. I can only hope there was a valid reason for this, rather than it being part of some harebrained scheme by the local council. I must admit the sight of this once great tree reduced to a stump dampened my spirits, but it didn’t seem to have the same effect on the Beaglets; Biggles trotted right up to it with a waggy tail, peed on it, and moved on, snapping me out of my moment of reflection. The Bigglet has always been very good at living in the moment; the only time he ever dwells on things lost is when part of his chew drops down between the boards on our deck. Even then, just slip another treat into his chewing gear and he’s instantly happy again.

This time of year the bluebells are very much in evidence, and The Beanster went on a few off-path sniffing missions among them, at least until her extending lead hit its end stop.

From time to time the sun cut through the trees and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this particular trail looking more beautiful.

In the midst of this uplifting beauty, Biggles reacted much as he had done to the sight of the tree. This reminded me of the famous Zen parable “Is that so”, in which a Zen master meets changes in fortune with the same calm, stable mood.

The pee that says “Is that so?”

Is Biggles a furry Zen Master, or just a little Beagle boy that likes peeing on stuff?

We did the standard figure-of-eight route that looped us back to the van. I think it took about 90 minutes, by which time everything that needed to be sniffed had been sniffed, everything that needed to be drenched in pee was suitably wet and smelly, and every doggy biccie that had been in my pocket was now in a tummy getting processed (probably with some other things that shouldn’t end up in a tummy).

Walks with the youngsters may be more lively, but when you want a carefree stroll in nature, you just can’t beat the original team.

Our four Beaglets have become much more of a pack in recent weeks. To encourage this we’ve been making a point of walking them all together once a day, even if oly one humie is available for the walk – that’s right: one pair of hands holding four leads. The first time I did this I really struggled to keep the leads from tangling; it was bit like a Maypole dance in which all the participants were on a sugar high. Just as I was starting to get the hang of it, an unexpected aspect of Beagle pack behaviour manifested itself. I guess you could call it the poo domino effect: all it takes is for one pack member (usually Biggles) to drop his furry pants and deposit a bottom-sausage, and suddenly all the other pack members feel compelled to do the same.

If walking four Beagles is difficult, dealing with four consecutive poo events while walking them is like trying to thread a needle while wearing boxing gloves. The moment that first poo hits the deck, Poppy and Monkey are desperate to get a bite of it, so I pull everyone away from the drop zone and transfer all the leads to one hand while trying to extract and open a poo bag. When all is ready, I misdirect the youngsters just long enough to lunge at the poo and scoop it up. Ideally the next poo in the sequence would happen right at this point, while there’s room in the open bag, but that’s not how it plays out. Nope, the next squat only happens once I’ve tied up the poo bag, untangled the Gordian knot of leads and just got everyone moving in the right direction again. Worse still, lately Biggles and Monkey seem to be in a competition to find out who can do the most dumps on a walk, so it’s not just four poos I have to deal with but sometimes eight or nine.

I don’t want to dent Biggles’ ego, but when it comes to sheer quantity of dumpage, Monkey holds the record due to the crazy amount of food he needs to fuel his growth.

A question I often get asked on walks is how well our four dogs get on, given the considerable age gap. I would say that Beanie & Biggles have accepted Poppy completely; she’s absolutely one of the team and knows all our little rituals, from treats at the kitchen baby gate to the mad race to crates when it’s bed time. With Monkey, things are more complicated; he’s very much accepted on walks and there are very rarely any clashes in the garden, but in the house he can still be on the receiving end of a stern telling off. Very often these admonishments are deserved; Monkey has more nonsense between his ears than even Biggles, and he’s hopeless at understanding where the red lines lie. That said, it’s easy to forget that despite his size (he’s almost the same size as Biggles now)  inside he’s still just a baby.  This is never more evident than when he gets a treat he hasn’t tried before; he plays with it for ages before attempting to chew it, and it never occurs to him that as he throws it around and rolls on it that any of our other three doglets – Poppy included – could steal it from him. He’s just a big, blundering, lovable oaf with all the common sense of a brain damaged lemming. Give him time and I’m sure he’ll progress to the same level of awareness and intelligence as Biggles (let’s face it we don’t want to set the bar too high).

Dad, there was a hole in the bottom of our padded play kennel, so I stuck my head through it. It may not have been one of my better decisions.

Another question – one we ask of ourselves from time to time – is whether we did the right thing by getting Poppy and Monkey while Beanie and Biggles are still with us. The answer has always come back “yes”, but increasingly this answer comes more quickly and with more confidence. I honestly believe that our older pups have gained more than they’ve lost, and perhaps the biggest gain is in the nature of our interactions with them. As they’ve aged and Beanie in particular has shown signs of frailty, the knowledge that we must eventually lose them has been ever harder to suppress, and they must have sensed our feelings. Instead of making the most of whatever time we have left with them, we were in danger of spending their last years or months listening fearfully to that relentless clock ticking down. Having Poppy and Monkey has dulled the worry and made it much easier just to take each day as it comes; that must surely be a benefit to our original pair of woofers.