We hadn’t had Beanie long before we discovered that if we failed to push any chairs tight into the kitchen table, she’d jump onto them and survey the exciting contents of the table top. As she got bigger and stronger, she graduated from snatching brief moments “at table” to actually being “on table”.

We really, really did our best to discourage this by always picking her up, saying “Off” firmly and lowering her back to the floor, but she’s never got the message. Or to be more accurate, she knows that table mountaineering is naughty but… “it’s there” and a Beagle’s got to do what a Beagle’s got to do, etc.

Well, things got markedly worse recently when she scaled the summit and managed to snatch a few scraps of steak pie. It was yummy. Very, very yummy. Since then, she’s learned how to make it to the table top with a lightning fast two stage jump. She sneaks round to the side and leaps onto your thigh. Then, without even the slightest delay, she uses your leg as a springboard for a second jump onto the table surface. Once there she knows she’s got at most a couple of seconds before one of us grabs her, so speed is of the essence. She singles out her target and consumes it with the desperation of an escaped convict.

Even when you get hold of her, the game’s not over. You leave your chair to pop her back on the ground, and now you’re in a race. Can you get your bum back on the chair before there’s a Beanie on it? Quite often the answer is No and you end up sitting on a Beagle cushion. And that’s no fun, because Beagle cushions are noisy, wriggly and sometimes bitey.

With identity theft becoming commonplace it’s more important than ever to make sure that you destroy documents containing personal information before disposing of them in the bin. Paper shredders are the usual solution, but they often leave your documents in a state where they could be reconstructed given enough patience and time. For complete peace of mind, you need the Beagle Shred-O-Matic.

The Beagle Shred-O-Matic has the following advantages over traditional, electrically powered paper shredders:

• Easy to use. Just deposit your important documents in a place where no other dog could possibly reach them, and turn your back for a few seconds. The Shred-O-Matic will retrieve the documents and begin the destruction process automatically!
• Environmentally friendly – runs on biofuel!
• All documents are coarsely shredded within a minute. Given a little more time, the Shred-O-Matic will employ enzymatic agents (also known as saliva and stomach acid) to further destroy the paper. Once fully processed the destroyed material is ejected from the rear waste port in a compact, biodegradable form. Rest assured that no-one, not even the most determined identity thief, will want to retrieve your documents after that!

Note: the shredding process sometimes generates unusual sounds. Do not be alarmed – this is part of the Shred-O-Matic’s normal function.

The recent changes to training and treating seem to be paying off, as Beanie’s recall is getting better and she never wanders far from our sides at the park. Just as we’re getting on top of one problem though, others arrive to keep us busy. Beanie is currently going through a heavy shedding and teething phase. It’s impossible to cuddle her without being coated in little hairs – you can even see them on the dark brown areas of her paw bed in this piccie:

And her teething has taken her chewing habit to a whole new level. Nothing is safe! In an attempt to make her mouth more comfortable – and give us a few moments’ peace – I’ve been making “Kongsicles”. I got the recipe (if you can call it that!) from the following site:

Make a super-fast frozen kong for your dog

I don’t bother with the funnel – I just spoon a layer of bio yogurt into the upturned kong, chuck in a small handful of Burns kibble, top it off with more yoghurt and stick the whole thing (still in the cup) in the freezer. Beanie absolutely loves it and it does seem to take away some of the teething discomfort:

Of course the Kong tends to move around as she’s working on it, and occasionally it rolls under the baby gate securing our office. Cue wailing and further chewing of the gate!

This isn’t directly about Beanie, although it does show how getting a dog changes your outlook on things.

Our house was newly built when we moved into it around eight years ago, and like many new properties it had a garden with very poor quality soil. Or to be more accurate, the top few inches loosely qualified as soil, while everything below that was either clay or compacted building site rubble. As a result, our garden would be wet pretty much all year round, and more like a swamp in winter.

We’d been prepared to live with that, but when we got Beanie we quickly found that ten minutes playing in the garden would leave her muddier than an hour running about at the park. It didn’t take long before we realized we’d have to do something to seriously improve the drainage.

There’s no shortage of advice about garden drainage on the Internet, and the most promising approach involved using a buried, perforated pipe to take excess moisture straight into our land drain and out of our garden. This sounded like a lot of work and expense though, and we weren’t convinced it would work. It seemed to rely on water being drawn through the soil into the pipe, but with all that clay to get through I couldn’t see it happening.

Eventually we gave up on the DIY idea and hit the Yellow Pages to look for local drainage experts. We settled on Cherry Landscaping, who seemed to have a more viable approach. They still use a perforated pipe, but they also remove a layer of clay and replace it with gravel to ensure that surface water can make it through to the pipe. We gave them a go and in three days our garden went from this:

(pictured before work started, and after we’d dug and refilled an
exploratory trench)

to this:

It wasn’t cheap by any means, but it’s certainly working. We’ve had very heavy rainfall over the last few days and it’s all drained away – no more impromptu lakes! Unfortunately we’ll have to keep Beanie off it for a couple of weeks to let the new turf bed in, but then she’ll have a brand new garden to play in. What’s betting she tries her hand at digging?