Our Beagle adventures
It’s hard to belive it, but Beanie is two today!
Celebrations started with a lovely sardine birthday cake topped with liver pate icing. The downside was she had to share it with her pesky brother and her flyball buddies:
Next it’s prezzie time! In our house we need to buy two identical versions of everything to avoid squabbles. Birthdays are no exception:
Birthdays are SO tiring!
Two years old and STILL sharing a bed with my pesky little brother!
Fellow dog owners will know just how expensive it is to keep spoilt little pooches happy. Things to eat, things to chew, things to play with (not to mention the vets bills, repair bills and replacement costs when the pups feel the need to amuse themselves!).
Well, I got a great bargain yesterday. A Tesco’s Finest, Free Range, Ready Cooked Chicken for just £1 out of the “Reduced” section.
First we chopped up all the chicken meat to make training treats to die for. And we were rewarded with some exceptionally good behaviour during this morning’s walk:
And some of the usual Beagle naughtiness:
Our two like something to chew on in the evening (or perhaps more accurately WE like them to have something to keep them quiet in the evening). We don’t like them to have too much rawhide and the little strips we give them each day don’t last long. Bones aren’t really an option as they’re likely to lead to squabbles. Most toys just aren’t tough enough for our power chewers. Nyalabones are the safest and most hardwearing, but they tend not to have much appeal…..UNLESS we flavour them.
So, during the afternoon I boiled up the chicken carcass. After a couple of hours of simmering it was clearly cooked to perfection as Beanie and Biggles began to howl and whine to get in the kitchen. I gathered up all their nylabones, gave them a good wash and popped them in the pan with the chicken stock. Beanie and Biggles camped out in the hall by the kitchen door. By the time evening came I fished out a couple of nylabones, cooled them and presented them to our hounds. We had peace for the whole evening. They were so tasty that Biggles chewed clean through his:
Finally, I fished the bones out of the stock and poured the lovely thick, lumpy stock into ice cube trays and froze it. We now have hundreds of tasty little chicken flavoured ice cubes for our puppies to snack on.
Not bad for £1, eh?
Yesterday we discovered a fantastic new place to take Beanie and Biggles for walks. 50 square kilometers of securely fenced moorland with 90 kilometers of well maintained tracks. It’s in the middle of nowhere with no roads nearby, no bushes and trees for the dogs to hide behind and there’s very little wildlife. It’s our local wind farm:
Our Beaglets had a blast!
They kept running on ahead until they were little dots on the horizon then they’d turn on their heels and come sprinting back. Until a couple of months ago Biggles was very good off-lead, but recently he’s been so crazy with excitement that he’s oblivious to us. We have no control at all and he doesn’t even want our treats. Fortunately Beanie has turned into a little angel and he follows her back every time. They spent quite a bit of time by our side which was a pleasant surprise.
It’s very rarely that Biggles goes anywhere without Beanie. But at one point he suddenly left the path and sprinted across country until he disappeared over the horizon. We heard some woofing then a couple of minutes later he came sprinting along the path from the opposite direction…..followed by some people on horseback. Fortunately they took a different turning so they never found out that the little hooligan was with us!
Is that horse pooh I smell?
The paths will be perfect for cycling. Miles and miles of tracks, hardly a soul in sight and no risk of the dogs getting near a road or livestock. We plan to take just one bike with us next time we’re there and see how things go.
Just to give you an indication of the size of the turbines…
A single blade on display at the centre
Looking up from the base of one of the turbines
Eventually we headed back to the car park with two very happy little doglets. As we approached the car we bumped into the horse riders Biggles had terrorized earlier. “Oh, there he is again – and look there’s two of them!”. It turned out our little boy had endeared himself to them. After a little bit of woofing he decided to trot along beside them for a while before sprinting back to us. They really were quite taken with him and thought he was quite a “dashing young man” in his little red harness – what a little charmer!