Our four Beaglets have become much more of a pack in recent weeks. To encourage this we’ve been making a point of walking them all together once a day, even if oly one humie is available for the walk – that’s right: one pair of hands holding four leads. The first time I did this I really struggled to keep the leads from tangling; it was bit like a Maypole dance in which all the participants were on a sugar high. Just as I was starting to get the hang of it, an unexpected aspect of Beagle pack behaviour manifested itself. I guess you could call it the poo domino effect: all it takes is for one pack member (usually Biggles) to drop his furry pants and deposit a bottom-sausage, and suddenly all the other pack members feel compelled to do the same.

If walking four Beagles is difficult, dealing with four consecutive poo events while walking them is like trying to thread a needle while wearing boxing gloves. The moment that first poo hits the deck, Poppy and Monkey are desperate to get a bite of it, so I pull everyone away from the drop zone and transfer all the leads to one hand while trying to extract and open a poo bag. When all is ready, I misdirect the youngsters just long enough to lunge at the poo and scoop it up. Ideally the next poo in the sequence would happen right at this point, while there’s room in the open bag, but that’s not how it plays out. Nope, the next squat only happens once I’ve tied up the poo bag, untangled the Gordian knot of leads and just got everyone moving in the right direction again. Worse still, lately Biggles and Monkey seem to be in a competition to find out who can do the most dumps on a walk, so it’s not just four poos I have to deal with but sometimes eight or nine.

I don’t want to dent Biggles’ ego, but when it comes to sheer quantity of dumpage, Monkey holds the record due to the crazy amount of food he needs to fuel his growth.

A question I often get asked on walks is how well our four dogs get on, given the considerable age gap. I would say that Beanie & Biggles have accepted Poppy completely; she’s absolutely one of the team and knows all our little rituals, from treats at the kitchen baby gate to the mad race to crates when it’s bed time. With Monkey, things are more complicated; he’s very much accepted on walks and there are very rarely any clashes in the garden, but in the house he can still be on the receiving end of a stern telling off. Very often these admonishments are deserved; Monkey has more nonsense between his ears than even Biggles, and he’s hopeless at understanding where the red lines lie. That said, it’s easy to forget that despite his size (he’s almost the same size as Biggles now)  inside he’s still just a baby.  This is never more evident than when he gets a treat he hasn’t tried before; he plays with it for ages before attempting to chew it, and it never occurs to him that as he throws it around and rolls on it that any of our other three doglets – Poppy included – could steal it from him. He’s just a big, blundering, lovable oaf with all the common sense of a brain damaged lemming. Give him time and I’m sure he’ll progress to the same level of awareness and intelligence as Biggles (let’s face it we don’t want to set the bar too high).

Dad, there was a hole in the bottom of our padded play kennel, so I stuck my head through it. It may not have been one of my better decisions.

Another question – one we ask of ourselves from time to time – is whether we did the right thing by getting Poppy and Monkey while Beanie and Biggles are still with us. The answer has always come back “yes”, but increasingly this answer comes more quickly and with more confidence. I honestly believe that our older pups have gained more than they’ve lost, and perhaps the biggest gain is in the nature of our interactions with them. As they’ve aged and Beanie in particular has shown signs of frailty, the knowledge that we must eventually lose them has been ever harder to suppress, and they must have sensed our feelings. Instead of making the most of whatever time we have left with them, we were in danger of spending their last years or months listening fearfully to that relentless clock ticking down. Having Poppy and Monkey has dulled the worry and made it much easier just to take each day as it comes; that must surely be a benefit to our original pair of woofers.

Monkey came quite close to being renamed this week. After watching the final season of the Viking saga The Last Kingdom, Susan started calling our youngest Beagle boy “Olaf”, and I have to admit it seemed like a good fit.

Like a big Viking oaf our boy does have a habit of blundering into things. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve crouched down to give Poppy a little cuddle, only to have our moment interrupted as two big Viking paws slam down onto the top of my head and a big slobbery mush pushes into my face. When he enters the living room his way of saying “hello” is to jump onto you unannounced, landing like a big sack of potatoes and trying to stick his (usually poo-covered) tongue up one of your nostrils.

Just like the stereotypical viking he’s quite fond of pillaging; he grabs socks, gloves, toilet rolls, tools, shoes – basically anything he can get his big chops around-  and carries them off to his pile of other looted items in the garden. He’s also developed a taste for humping. At the moment Poppy is the sole target of his x-rated pelvic activities, and he has absolutely no sense of propriety. For example one morning we closed the two of them on the deck for a moment, and Poppy tried to squeeze through bars of the gate just as she’d done as a little pup. Poppy is still very much a titch, but apparently she has grown enough to cause her to get stuck about half way through the bars. Once she realized her predicament she started to panic, and as both Susan and I raced up from the garden to assist, Olaf  The Insatiable decided that now would be a great time for a bit of rumpy pumpy. From his point of view a fair maiden was stuck halfway through the gate with her business end fully accessible – what else would you expect a Viking to do? Oddly enough his unwanted advances did motivate Poppy to pull herself back through the gate before I had to rip the bars off it, so I guess you could say he helped, after a fashion.

A couple of days later an incident occurred which wrecked my boy’s Viking aspirations. I was giving the youngsters their morning walk and as we passed a house with a very territorial and vocal doglet, I realized that their garden gate was open. Before I could do anything the dog in question sprinted out to confront us, woofing angrily. Fortunately verbal abuse was as far as this encounter went. Poppy took it in her stride, but what did Olaf The Fearless Beserker do? He bravely made a little puddle. This was hardly the stuff of heroic Viking sagas; it was just a silly little boy peeing himself because he got scared by another dog – a dog who incidentally was smaller than him. “Olaf” was instantly right off the table, and Monkey was back for good.

In those early weeks after getting Poppy I remember taking her for a walk and thinking “wow, this really shows just how manageable Beanie and Biggles have become”. At some point in their lives we just started trusting them to be left alone in the house while we worked in the garden or had a conversation with a neighbor; on walks I could just say “hold on a minute” while I re-tied my laces or fiddled about with my phone and they’d just stand there quietly without pulling, and if I wanted a posed photo of them I could just tell them to “wait” and (briefly) release their leads without them running off. We’d come to take all of these little things for granted, but with Poppy and subsequently Monkey, all bets were off. Puppies were hard work while our golden-oldie A-Team was – by comparison – a predictable well-oiled machine.

All that has changed.

The turning point came just after Beanie had a run of bad days. She was lethargic, on and off her food, and getting quite wobbly on her feet. She’d been doing all the physio exercises we’d been given, but Beanie was was still deteriorating. Thanks to the heat from the new wood burning stove we’d installed in the living room, she was also looking very disheveled, with big tuffs of winter fur coat coming out all over the house. Things had gotten so bad I’d actually said to Susan “I think this could be Beanie’s last year”, and she’d confessed to having the same thoughts. Then we realized that since getting Monkey, Beanie hadn’t been getting up onto our laps and requesting regular back massages. Over the next couple of days, Susan began giving Beanie thorough back and shoulder massages each day whether the Beanster wanted it or not, and since the massage sessions made Biggles a bit jealous and woofy, he got them too.

By the the third day, the changes in the A-Team were dramatic. Beanie abruptly rediscovered her passion for humping Susan’s legs and began demanding tug play sessions; her appetite even for lowly kibble returned fully and consistently, and no unguarded cup was safe from an exploratory snout insertion. It felt like we had the naughty Beanie from five years ago back in our house, and Biggles? Well he got a full dose of renewed vigor too. Any sock that wasn’t nailed to the floor was his; he pawed open cupboards in search of sandpaper and masking tape to shred, and worst of all, he became a master bread thief.

Recently we got a little bread-maker machine to make a fresh loaf whenever we need it and without the big preparation hassle or the cost of putting the oven on. The smell of baking bread is wonderful and apparently the taste is great too, but I wouldn’t really know because Biggles beats me to it every time. It’s as though every loaf that comes out of that little machine is cursed, destined to end up in Biggles’ black hole of a gut, or at the very least have a Beagle mouth-sized chunk torn from it. In truth it’s always my fault; I open the kitchen baby gate, get distracted by something for a moment, he sneaks in and the next thing I hear is the commotion of a snatch and grab mission. It doesn’t really matter where on the worktops the bread happens to be sitting – his pogo-stick jumping ability is back at full strength and he can reach any target that’s below our head height. I hit my limit the other day and shouted at him, but any residual anger was swept away when he later had a bout of vomiting and spent several hours in the humie bed with his head on my pillow.

The Bigglet, convalescing on my pillow after a severe bread overdose.

In the midst of all this Poppy and Monkey are still doing their best to be inducted into the Naughty Hall of Fame. Monkey made a determined effort to pull down my pants yesterday while I was talking to a neighbor through the garden fence. This morning on their walk I looked round when the leads went tight and saw a writhing mass of Beagle body parts. Apparently they’d decided that now was a good time for a wrestling match, and until my eyes and brain caught up with the action I couldn’t tell which bits belonged to which Beaglet; one furry bonce was emerging from beneath someone’s tail, while another one was growing out of an armpit, and there seemed to be far too many ears and feet for only two puppies. When silliness like that happens on walks my unthinking response is to say “Oi!” to get their attention. Just for fun I counted the number of times I had to say “Oi!” until we got back home, and it turned out that was a nine-Oi walk. I then went out with the rejuvenated A-Team and we had a sixteen-Oi walk. That’s right: the youngsters were outclassed by their elders, and it’s worth noting that some of those winning “Oi!” points were awarded for high-difficulty maneuvers like pooping through the gaps in a fence into someone else’s garden and sticking one’s nose into the shopping bag of a passer-by.

Poppy and Monkey consoling each other after being out-naughtied

As I sat recovering from the walks I took pleasure at the thought that Beanie & Biggles have rediscovered their inner puppies, and that those inner puppies are still naughtier than our actual puppies. Then I had a follow-up thought: if you say “Oi!” to a Beagle often enough, will they starting thinking that’s their name?

As usual, here are a few more shots of the smaller Ois: