Glen Trool Assault Course

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Paul

Last weekend we had another Canicross camping trip, this time at Glen Trool. As before we’d lined up a hill walk (up The Merrick of course) and a good long cross country run round the Water of Minnoch for the group’s activities. The latter isn’t one of the conventional, marked trails around Glen Trool so I was keen to sort out any navigational difficulties ahead of the run. To that end, I planned to harness up the pups and walk the route after we’d set up the caravan, and before everyone else arrived.

First though, there was lunch. Susan cooked up some toasties, and we sat down hoping to eat them in a civilized way, which is never easy with two Beagles in such a confined space. It was relatively easy to convince Biggles to settle down next to me, but as usual Beanie was a much tougher nut to crack. When she eventually gave up hope of stealing the toastie off Susan’s plate, she tried for mine, failed, then immediately focused on raiding the still red-hot electric grill on the worktop. I still had my toastie in one hand but I managed to grab Beanie’s collar with my free hand just before she could burn herself. I was very pleased at not only having protected my toastie from Beanie, but also having protected my Beanie from being toasted, and just as I started to say “that was a close one” I heard a decisive “crunch”. Yep, you guessed it, my toastie hand had strayed into Biggles’s strike range and he had taken full advantage. So for me, lunch was short.

After finishing the remaining half of my toastie unmolested, I successfully walked the 7 mile route in the rain, guided by the route description, two Beagle noses and the gps app on my phone. I was now confident that navigation would not be a problem during the run. Other things like bogs, fallen trees and steep hills could still be a problem, and indeed at one point – even at walking pace – I did end up doing a bit of bottom surfing in the mud, but I figured somehow we’d all muddle through on the day.

The first group activity wasn’t the run though, it was a walk up the Merrick. Despite gloomy forecasts we actually got pretty decent weather, but the summit was shrouded in mist. That’s three times we’ve climbed the Merrick, and we still haven’t properly seen the views from the top!

A panorama from just beyond the first hump, twenty minutes or so from the top.

The final day of the trip was reserved for the run, and again the weather gave us surprisingly good conditions: a very light drizzle – just enough to keep us all cool, without getting us soaked. As I’d feared, the hazards on the first part of the trail claimed a few victims; nearly everybody ended up in a ditch at some point, but the group coped admirably with the hills. By the time we all arrived back at the Glen Trool visitor centre we were liberally decorated with mud splats, grazes and insect bites, but everybody seemed to be happy so I’d have to call the venture a success.

I think Beanie & Biggles truly feel at home in our caravan now. Both of them really stretch out when they sleep, and Biggles is becoming a little more tolerant of people wandering close to the caravan, unless they’re wearing a particularly provocative hat!

A muddy tummy is a happy tummy

The Cost of Grapes

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Paul

Last weekend Susan bought what she thought was a very cheap half kilo pack of fresh grapes, but they ended up costing us over £300. The reason for this massively over-inflated price? In a word, Beagles!

The grapes had been stashed right at the back of one of the kitchen worktops, safely out of doggy reach – or so we thought. The thing is, The Bigglet gets very bored when his Mum and Dad are preoccupied with work, and that boredom propels him to new levels of naughtiness. In this case, boredom propelled our pogostick Beagle to the boing of his life, enabling him to snatch said grapes.

A bored little boy snatches a sock from the clothes airer, some days prior to his big score with the grapes

I heard a commotion coming from the kitchen and reluctantly went to investigate, only to find Biggles out on the lawn munching his way through the last of the grapes. Beanie was out there with him, and I suspected she’d managed to down a few of them as well. Grapes are toxic to dogs, and this was of course out of normal vet hours, so after a quick phone consult with a vet nurse we were headed down the motorway to the Glasgow Pets A&E.

Like I said, we knew grapes were toxic to dogs, but until we talked to the A&E vet, we had no idea just how toxic. In some dogs even a handful of grapes could cause renal failure, and by my counting half a kilo is rather more than a handful. Fortunately we got Biggles to the vet well within 2 hours of consumption, and she quickly administered a shot to cause him to vomit up his potentially life-threatening belly banger of a snack. To play it safe Beanie got the magical jag of barfing too. The shots didn’t work immediately – there was a ten to fifteen minute delay which gave the staff just enough to time to bring a pile of old newspapers and a roll of kitchen towel before the fun began.

Biggles was the first to be sick, and as soon as that huge pile of undigested (and incidentally completely unchewed) grapes hit the newspaper, the Beanster lunged right at it to snatch a few. She didn’t succeed, but she got awfully close, and now the vet nurse who was holding her has a better idea of how fast fit Beagles can move. A couple of minutes later though, Beanie was far too busy losing her own lunch to care what Biggles was bringing up.

Neither of our two were keen on being sick on the newspaper we’d laid out for them; they clearly wanted to soil an otherwise clean section of the floor, or maybe one of our shoes, so we had to follow them around with the paper trying to guess where the next payload would hit, all the while being careful not to stand in one we’d missed. It occurred to me that this could be good material for a blockbusting video game. “Beagle Barf Catch” for the Nintendo Wii, anyone?

Anyway, when the vomiting stopped it was clear that poor Beanie hadn’t eaten any grapes, so she’d gone through all that for nothing. Biggles on the other hand had dodged 500g of green bullets. I handed over my credit card and paid the £226 bill, only to be informed that wasn’t quite the end of it; the vet recommended we take The Bigglet for a blood test the next day to make sure there could be no hidden/delayed ill effects from his grape binge. We complied, and this put another £80 on the bill, bringing the grand total to over £300, and that’s without taking the fuel cost into account. So there you go, next time you go to buy grapes, make sure you can afford them!

All things considered, Biggles’ sock habit is considerably cheaper than his grapes habit!

The Almost Birthday Poop

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Paul

The first year or so of Beanie’s life was punctuated by frequent outings to the vet. She got tummy bugs, kennel cough, induced vomiting to force her to give up a complete, still-wrapped packet of sausages, and ultimately ended up getting surgery to remove some plastic material she insisted on swallowing. Things calmed down a bit after that, and for the last couple of years she’s really only seen the vet for her regular checkup and vaccination jabs.

Clearly some kind of worrying illness was long overdue, so about a week ago she skipped her twice-daily poo regimen one day, then more than made up for it the next by attempting to go seven times or so. Each time she went she released only small amounts of something resembling a McDonald’s chocolate milkshake. Naturally we started thinking “blockage”, and Beanie fed this worry by producing a UVO (Unidentified Vomited Object) one morning. Still, she was in all other respects her normal self, so we played the waiting game for another day or so. By the time we finally made an appointment with the vet we were intensely sleep-deprived, because Beanie was needing to go on the hour, every hour from about 2am through to 7am. Each time she signalled it was pootime one of us went out into the garden with her, armed with the 1 million candle power rechargeable torch I’d bought from HomeBase during a sale last year. Susan had been doubtful that we really needed another torch, but deep down inside I had a man’s intuition that those 1 million candles would be useful for something, and now here was the perfect application: nocturnal poo examination! But I digress. At the vet, we received the welcome news that in all likelihood Beanie’s problem was simple diarrhoea and not some partial blockage that would require surgery. We came home armed with a probiotic/gut calming preparation called “Pro-Kolin” and a course of antibiotics.

We tried the Pro-Kolin stuff first for a couple of days, and having seen no significant improvement, started Beanie on the antibiotics. They worked fast, and by day two – which happened to be Susan’s birthday – the diarrhoea had stopped. What we needed now was for Beanie to have a healthy regular movement, and Susan joked that the best birthday present Beanie could give her mum would be a huge solid poo. Well, Beanie ended up delivering the present a day late, but it was an awfully big, well-wrapped present when it finally arrived. Filled with the joy of her successful bowel emptying, Beanie spent the morning cavorting round the garden with her toys: