Some fourteen years ago when we drove down south to pick up little 7 week old Biggles, his breeder saw the locking bolts on our crate and asked if our then 10 month old Beanie girl had worked out how to defeat them yet. I replied that she hadn’t, and in fact she still hasn’t even with 15 years to work on them. I remember thinking there’s no way a Beagle could ever operate a bolt lock like that. Since then of course I’ve seen many videos of Beagles – and some other dogs – working out how to do things that are normally the preserve of humans and maybe other animals equipped with opposable thumbs.. like apes.. and monkeys. Well, we have  got a Monkey, and he’s suddenly developed the ability to do this:

To be fair Biggles has opened similar doors in our house a couple of times, but only by accident; he’s never understood the role of the handle and how to operate it. As you can see from the video, Monkey has that down completely. He looks at the handle, and with one purposeful and confident movement of his paw, he opens the door. It’s quite spooky being on the other side of a door that he’s trying to open.. a bit like this:

If I lean on the door to keep it closed, he keeps on turning that handle, puzzled and frustrated by the fact that door hasn’t opened yet. As entertaining as his new ability is, it has created problems because we only have so many baby gates, and there are plenty of things in our rooms that don’t need an ever-inquisitive, unsupervised Monkey trying to reveal their innermost secrets. Even worse, he’s managed to open the front door – which opens inwards – and take himself and Poppy for a (thankfully brief and uneventful) tour of our front garden. To that end, I disappeared into my shed for an hour one day and came up with this:

It’s crude I grant you – I haven’t even sanded and painted any of the three such units I’ve made – but they are proving effective at blocking Monkey’s handle-operating abilities.

On a different note, we recently had an unusually early and sustained frost.  Weather forecasts kept getting it very wrong, predicting zero or maybe minus one on nights where the temperature actually dropped to around -9 Celsius. That’s nothing compared to what the “bomb cyclone” has brought to the US of course, but it’s still been unusually cold for us at this point in the year.

I’m not sure what this is Poppy

But it’s very slippy

As cold as the thermometers told me those days were, they had nothing on the fast-freeze we experienced yesterday morning in the wind and rain. Windchill is something that Scotland does very well and though the Beaglets still enjoyed their romp on the beach, they were nearly as relieved as me when it was over and we got back to the van. The instant I opened the door (I would have got Monkey to do that for me, but he’s still working on using keys), everyone piled into Biggles’ travel crate. Everyone that is except Biggles himself, who was left outside, unable to squeeze himself in past the other three Beagles (well, two-and-a-half given Poppy’s diminutive size), all still wearing their soaking wet harnesses and leads. It took ages for me to extract them and dispatch each of them to their own crates, and still longer to get my chilled fingers working enough to drive us back home!

Remember this little gem from Futurama?

Just like Zoidberg, Monkey has been encouraging various items to surrender their mysteries to him.

The mysteries within this toy have been fully surrendered, and they were mostly white and fluffy.

Unlike Zoidberg, Monkey hasn’t even considered the possibility of fixing things after it all goes wrong.

Monkey seeks comfort from the donut beds as toy-killer’s remorse starts to bite

Thus far toys have been the main subject of Monkey’s investigations, but he is starting to branch out; the inner bits of Biggles’ bed are now the outer bits, and our clothes airer did not fare well when he had a short but intense one-to-one with it . We’ve been through all this before with Beanie and Biggles of course, but neither of them were half as good at opening cupboards, babygates and doors as Monkey. It’s scary how quickly he’s learning to do things, but perhaps his biggest achievement is the regurgitation of a fully intact dog jobby onto our lounge rug. Note that I said “fully intact” there; any Beagle can vomit up a partially digested poop (or “shitvom”, to use the correct term) but puking up a complete bottom sausage takes next-level skill, and Monkey has it.

Poppy has been developing her skills too. She’s recently discovered that she’s small enough to squeeze through some the gaps in the sheep fencing of our inner garden. I’ve been criss-crossing wires over the larger apertures to keep her out, but she’s still getting past them somehow. It’s beginning to look like there aren’t many things that can keep Poppy out!

Beanie can’t seem to decide whether she’s an old crotchety lady or a little pup who just happens to have a more subtle variant of tricolor paintwork. Her voice has been changing over the past year and now she sounds a bit like singer who’s had too many smokes and neat whiskeys, and she’s more prone to use that voice to show disapproval of other dogs. The combination of her voice and demeanour conjure up the image of an old lady hobbling around, poking things with her walking stick and saying “Nah, I don’t think much of that”. The other day I ‘d just parked up for our beach run and as I sorted out the harnesses I could see a dog and his owner playing football on the grass. Beanie could see it too, and she immediately let her disapproval be known. I coud almost hear the translation for her grumbling: “Outrageous! Look at him running around with a ball like that! He should have his balls off if you ask me! Hormones! That’s the problem.”

And yet despite all the old git grumbling she’s still a very playful little girl who enjoys a game of tug, a sprint on the beach and – more recently – a daily afternoon trip into the garden with Monkey and Poppy for a round of marrowbone rolls. This was something I started to help Beanie grow closer to the pups, and it has stuck, but really I don’t think she even notices that the pups are present – it’s all about the treat. Still it’s great to see her out there getting just as excited as the youngsters.

Well maybe Beanie doesn’t get quite as excited as Poppy!

When she’s not sleeping or pestering me to go out in the garden with Monkey and Poppy, Beanie also likes to roam the house checking up on us, to the extent that she’s earned the nickname Snoopy. Now most dogs probably get curious about what their owners are up to, but with Beanie it’s more intense than that – the snooping has an accusatory feel to it. When I see her watching me I feel I have to explain myself, as though I’ve been caught doing something slightly dodgy by a teacher.

What are you doing dad?

Disgraceful! You wouldn’t have caught me doing that when I was a pup!

I’m keeping my eye on you dad!

By comparison, Biggles has been remarkably trouble-free of late. He snuggles up to me in bed, keeps the neighbours informed about Beagle mealtimes, and regularly presents his tummy for tickling. If there was an award the most well behaved Beagle boy during the kast fortnight, he wouldn’t get it, but he just might be one of the runners up.

The garden flooding we experienced last month weakened a couple of posts in our rear fence, so one dry morning I set out to put a couple of fresh, concreted posts in there to firm everything up.

The thinking behind this was of course to prevent any loss of Beagle containment, so it’s ironic that this maintenance work gave rise to the very thing it was intended to avoid. I’m getting ahead of myself though.. I’d better start at the beginning.

I gave our team of four a good long early walk, fed them, and then put Monkey and Poppy into their crates. Beanie and Biggles remained uncrated as they go straight into deep nap mode after a walk, especially if the donut beds in the lounge have been stacked to clear some floor space.

Heaven is a double-decker donut with Biggles in the middle of it

So with two furries in their crates and two in donut comas, I figured I had a couple of hours of unhindered working time. I got off to a good start, cutting the new posts to the correct length and digging two good deep holes, but soon I felt the need for coffee break. You know how it is with coffee breaks – they always go on longer than intended – and when I resumed work it was time for the youngsters to be released back into the garden. Still, the hardest parts of the job had already been done and what remained was straightforward enough: pop the new posts into the holes, screw them roughly into position against the fence, then pour in water and some quick setting concrete stuff and clean up. Half an hour or so and everything should be done, right? No, wrong, because it never goes like that.

I called in Susan to help with the first bit. While I ‘went round to the other side of the fence to brace the first of the new posts in position (being careful to close the gate after me), Susan prepared to drive a screw in from the front to hold it. As soon as I got into position we hit a problem: the screwdriver bit was chewing up the screw. I went back round and swapped the screw out for a new one. We were ready to go again, but now the screw I’d grabbed required a different bit from the one currently fixed into the driver. Back round I went. At some point in the proceedings I failed to notice that I’d left the gate open. Monkey however did notice, and wandered through.

At the back of our garden there’s a narrow bank that separates us from a fast-flowing burn, while on either side are neighbouring gardens, separated from us by fences that don’t fully reach down to the undulating bank. Obviously my initial concern was that he might fall into the burn and be carried away downstream, so I went after him with some haste, and with even more haste, he dodged under the neighbour’s fence and into their garden.

Much of the time Monkey is suprisingly well behaved, but right at this moment he wasn’t the least bit interested in my attempts to recall him, so I just had to chase him down. As a humie I didn’t have the option of squeezing under the fence, so I had to run up and out of our garden and into the neighbour’s garden via their gate. As I finally closed in on him, he took off into the the next adjoining property, beyond which lay the outside world: countryside punctuated by busy roads. I hopped over the next (thankfully low) fence in pursuit, but this garden was somewhat overgrown with lots of brambles and other spiky foliage. I knew that if he took flight again I wouldn’t be able to stop him from escaping into world beyond. It was time for a cooler, more laid back approach that wouldn’t spook him. You know what they say: slowly, slowly catch Monkey. I don’t know about actual monkeys, but when it comes to Beagles called Monkey, that old adage seems to be bang on the money.

I calmed down and held off stalking him for a moment, and in return he stopped trying to evade me. He slowly ambled back towards our garden, and after a moment I began to follow, setting my pace so that little by little I was catching up to him. When I was close enough I made a grab for his shoulders. I missed those, but my hands landed on his big rear end and found a solid grip. One scoop action later he was in my arms, and seemingly happy enough that his latest unsanctioned adventure had come to an end. His little sister gave him a bit of a hard time on his return, but at least she didn’t hump him.

Despite a heavy downpour (not forecast) I finished the fence repair work and there were no further escapes, but I need to remember that even a secure fence is only secure if I remember to keep the blummin’ gate closed.