In keeping with my habit of taking formal portraits of the pups around birthdays, here’s the latest round of shots.

Poppy – whose birthday triggered this photoshoot – was very easy to photograph, and that’s mainly thanks to Beanie & Biggles; they’ve taught me that that it is most unwise to create any direct link between the click of the camera shutter and the giving of treats. Over the years they have sought ever higher modeling rates – eventually demanding biccie down-payments even before I got to take a single shot.

By contrast, Poppy and Monkey quietly and for the most part patiently followed my directions while I clicked away; only when I called them did they finally get rewarded.

Admittedly Monkey did spend the first couple of minutes walking behind the backdrop and knocking over my flash stands, but once he settled he was a pro.

Biggles was his usual biccie-demanding self, and being mostly deaf every woof came out at full volume. On top of that, he couldn’t understand my verbal directions. By the time we finished my ears were ringing and my pockets were empty of treats, but we got there.

Beanie was the hardest to photograph. The years are really catching up with her now, so instead of having to deal with an impatient and demanding spoilt princess, I had this little old lady that kept nodding off. My first round of shots had to be discarded because of the half-asleep look, so I redid the shoot at an earlier time the next day and got closer to the sparkle and inner light that I’ve always associated with my little girl.

Monkey is finally getting the hang of fetching a ball. He’s not 100% reliable by any means, but when he’s on form his goofiness makes up for all the failed retrievals!

There I am, doing a bit of vacuuming in our “posh” (supposedly less Beagled lounge) and I see that one of our ornaments needs a bit of dusting. The ornament in question is a polished lump of tree that has a number of alabaster eggs in it. As I start the dusting process, I notice something in the tree that isn’t an egg. At first I assume it’s some smelly potpourri thing that Susan’s put in there, but when I pick it up to dust it, I realise that while it is a bit smelly, it’s certainly not a regular potpourri item. It is in fact a small hard dog shit, specifically the kind of dropping that Biggles was producing before we added roughage to his diet.

The fact that Biggles had pooped in the house was not overly surprising; before we added roughage to his meals he would frequently get “caught short” and have to do an emergency trouser drop wherever he happened to be. This however was no accident; this was precision ninja-like pooing at its finest. I’ve seen him do stunt-poops on walks and I know the level of skill and planning that it’s involved. He’s pooped through the gaps in fences, left logs on the tops of surprisingly high tree stumps and on the tops of flowers, and as previously documented, he has successfully taken a dump on Poppy’s head.

In order to produce his little poopourri offering he undoubtedly had to reverse-park his big white bum over the ornament with some precision and then carefully push, all the while resisting the urge to go for a poo shuffle (a technique designed to create a dotted line of poops, which resembles a floppy-eared golfer preparing to putt).

The question that keeps bouncng round my head after making this find is: why did he do it? Was he trying to tell me something? Or was he just having a senior moment? Only Biggles knows, and he’s not telling. Or at least he’s not telling me. I have noticed that Monkey has started to display similar pooing skills on walks, so presumably Biggles has taken the Monkster to one side and passed on his deep knowledge of the anal arts.