The White Helmets

Posted on June 6, 2009 by Paul

The Royal Army put on a recruitment show at one of our local parks this morning, so we took Beanie and Biggles along to investigate. Several displays were running throughout the day, and our walk lasted just long enough to see the White Helmets motorcycle stunt team in action. Here are a few pics..

Yes it’s battle-hardened, but I wonder how long those chunky tracks would stand up to professional Beagle chewers?

Being part of the British Army, the White Helmets use British bikes made by Triumph. Seeing all that smoke belching out, maybe they should go with BMW or Kawasaki instead..

The display gets under way…

Four wheels, but he’s only using two so I guess it still qualifies!

When you’re having to do this to get all your passengers on board it’s time to swap the bike for a car

Disassembling a formation takes as much effort as putting it together!

And it’s over..

The show was very, very professionally done though I don’t think Beanie & Biggles appreciated it – they just kept trying to pull Susan towards the fast food trailer the whole time :)

Beagles – Who’d Have ‘Em?

Posted on June 6, 2009 by Susan

Beanie and Biggles enjoy agility so much that they decided to practice on their own:

I guess in future we need to make sure we pack everything away before letting them out to the garden to pee!

Agility Practice and a Cooling Swim in the River

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Susan

I’ll start out this post with some lovely photos of Beanie tackling the agility long jump in our back garden today – I think I’ll be getting one of these printed and hung on the wall!

Sunday’s fun agility session at the racing put both Beanie and I back in the mood for a practice session. It was too short notice to hire the agility barn, but as today’s course plan shows, you can actually fit quite a good course into our tiny, postage stamp garden!

It was a tricky course in places are there were two points where there were different possible routes. I had to make it clear to Beanie with my body language what way I wanted her to go (something I’ve not had much success with so far), and she had to pay attention.

After the first time over the long jump she had to go through the tunnel (4), but the second time she was to go over the jump (10)
After the first time through the tunnel she was to go through the weaves (5), but the second time over the jump (11)

Anyway, enough rambling. Here’s the video of Beanie in action and as you will see we didn’t do too badly :

We’re still not doing much jumping with Biggles. We’ll hold off on that until he’s a year old. However, we do give him the occasional little go, and we do quite a bit of work on commands and directional controls. Until recently it was hard work – he got so excited he simply couldn’t pay attention. But he’s doing really well now – in many ways he’s easier to work with than Beanie as he doesn’t have her strong independent streak. When he does start agility properly he’ll make fast progress!

It wasn’t just in agility that we made progress. After a very energetic walk in the park we decided to go down to the river to cool down. Louise (Tess, Clara and Tara’s owner) had suggested that we try throwing Beanie and Biggles favorite dried fish snacks into the river to encourage them in for a swim (although Beanie is an excellent swimmer she likes the pool heated to at least 29 degrees and tends to avoid rivers). As you can see it was a big success (Thanks for the tip Louise – now we can wash the mud off BEFORE we go home !):

This might look like a kiss at first glance, but in actual fact Biggles has found a leaf and Beanie wants it!

We came across this in the middle of the park:

There didn’t seem to be anyone around so I’ve no idea what it was all about. But I thought it was quite funny.