We regularly work on “core” obedience with Beanie: sit, down, wait, walking to heel etc, but the biggest chunk of training time is always devoted to recall. Up to a few weeks ago, it was pretty much 100%. We could impress even seasoned dog owners by calling her back from any situation. Even if she’d got out of sight round a corner or over the brow of a hill, a loud assertive “Beanie! Come” would always result in a little furry bullet shooting towards us.

Lately though Beanie’s recall has become much less reliable, probably due to her growing confidence and increasing sniffing abilities. She doesn’t run as fast when we call her, and sometimes she seems to deliberately ignore the command – especially if she’s playing with other dogs.

To combat this we’ve been trying a range of different exercises/games to make being returning to us more fun and interesting:

1) Beagle Tennis. Susan and I position ourselves at different ends of the house, each armed with a toy and plenty of treats. One of us engages Beanie in vigorous play, then after a few seconds the other summons her, gives her a big treat and gets her playing again. We keep swapping roles, getting her to dash between us over and over again. Of course even in her excited state Beanie eventually realizes what’s happening and tries to eliminate the parts of the exercise that doesn’t involve food. She snatches the treat from the current caller then immediately sprints back to the other for another serving.

2) Hide and seek. This is one for the park. One of us hides behind a tree while the other encourages Beanie to find them and get a really tasty treat as reward. To help her succeed, the hider makes a noise or waves an arm. On a good day this works great – after a few repetitions it’s obvious that she’s watching both of us like a hawk, and pretty soon you can’t make it to your chosen hiding place without having to step over a hungry, expectant Beagle. Sometimes though it doesn’t go quite as planned. More than once I’ve been left standing behind a tree with a stupid grin on my face while Beanie decides that she’s had enough of playing with us and would rather get some wrestling practice with a nearby terrier.

3) Tracking foundations. This is kind of like hide and seek except that one of us holds on to Beanie, while the “hider” dangles the treat in front of her to get her attention. The hider then runs off making sure that Beanie can see roughly where they’re going. Ideally, Beanie will get some of the way there on memory, and then have to engage her tracking ability to find the exact hiding place and get her treat. Currently Beanie’s not too good at this one, and I’m becoming convinced that Beanie’s nose is faulty. Sure, she uses it a lot, running around sniffing with her head to the ground, but I think it’s all show. Quite often I can drop a treat on the floor right in front of her and she’ll take a good thirty seconds to find the damn thing. What’s more, if her nose is so good, how come she has to stick it right up another dog’s bum in order to get a good whiff of Channel Number Two?

On top of this, we’ve been getting lots of great recall exercises at Beanie’s training classes, Dalmeny Dog Training run by Jacquie Clark. Although quite a few people attend the classes, Jacquie still manages to address each dog’s own set of problem areas, and last time she helped us out by getting us to call Beanie while she was playing with her favorite sparring partner, Toby the Border Terrier. As soon as I issued the command, our little rascal shot off in the direction of Toby’s owners. Didn’t even spare me a glance! Toby subsequently returned the favor by running over to us. Clearly those two pups are conspiring against us.

Other than that, Beanie’s obedience is generally improving. She’ll often respond to “leave”, and we can now get her walking to heel reasonably well with the “close” command, so long as we’ve got plenty of treats. There are still times when extreme measures are required to restore order though. A drinks bottle filled with noisy coins sometimes does the job, although increasingly she just tries to play with it, no matter how loudly I thump it on the floor. Right now, a quick spray of water is our weapon of last resort, and generally it’s used to protect what’s left of the baby gate we’ve got to seal off our stairs. This is what a few minutes of determined Beagle chewing can do:

And I should also confess that we’re not too good at keeping Beanie off the bed. I try to be strict but, well, she’s just too cute:

After her bitter defeat in the boxing ring, Beanie has switched to professional wrestling. Her first bout – against Mowgli, a 4 month old St. Bernard with a huge weight advantage – could not have gone better:

Although she’s young (around 4 months) and still quite small, Beanie has a very strong personality and regularly gets the better of other dogs. For example, not long after we got Beanie we took her round to a friend’s house to meet their dog Sophie. Sophie’s a medium sized, adult mongrel with a lovely nature and plenty of confidence when in her own territory. However, within two minutes our little madam had claimed Sophie’s bed as her own and chewed a hole in it.

But it’s not easy being top dog. Everyone’s after your title and sooner or later some cocky young punk is going to catch you with a lucky shot. And that’s exactly what happened at the park today. We met up with a Spaniel cross pup called Ruby, and after the usual pre-fight negotiations and weigh-in, the action started. Since Sky Sports own the TV rights to the fight, I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with my blow-by-blow account and some ringside stills.

In the first round, there was lots of eye contact, with each fighter trying to psyche out her opponent.

The second round saw some superb head shots from the reigning champ. Check out this stunning left hook:

In the third round, things got messy. Unlike the the pampered champ, Ruby didn’t have a pedigree. She’d come up from the streets and wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty to get the win. When the opportunity presented itself, she snook in a “Tyson” special

The ref quickly stopped the round and ordered both fighters back to their corners for treats (cheese and pieces of apple in this case). However, Beanie never seemed to recover and in round four she was on the receiving end of some punishing blows:

Eventually, the red furred upstart landed the finishing blow and Beanie lost her crown by TKO:

Just in case you’re thinking the ear-biting incident looked a bit vicious, don’t worry! Both pups had a whale of a time playing with each other, and we headed back to the car assuming that we’d have a nice quiet afternoon while our ex-champ got her beauty sleep. How wrong we were, because Beanie was still full of beans. She saw an older dog running with a stick and decided that it should be hers. After several laps of the course, it was!

By the time we finally left the park, we had a very muddy pup!