Size-wise Monkey has now overtaken his older sister Poppy, and looking at them playing it’s sometimes easy to forget that he’s still just a four month old pup who still has a lot of essential skills to acquire. For example it’s only in the last week that he’s managed to jump onto our sofas, and even now he can only do it if he’s focused on play; if he stops to think about it he’s overwhelmed and either aborts the attempt or face-plants on the seat cushion before sliding back to the floor. He can climb any flight of steps as well as his sister, but turn him around and ask him to come back down and his confidence can suddenly crumble. His face is so expressive you can see the emotional roller-coaster he’s on as he as tackles something new: “Yeah I can do that! Oh hang on, actually it looks a bit scary. Oh crap I’m going to die! No, no, I’m OK, I’m OK. Oh yeah that was easy – I was never scared!”

We rode the roller-coaster together recently when I took him for his first trip up Loudoun Hill with Poppy. It’s only a small hill that normally takes about 10 minutes from base to summit, but the great Monkey expedition easily clocked up 20 minutes on the ascent, and even longer on the way down. I very much enjoyed cupping my hand under his little furry bum to give him a boost when needed, but I was toiling on the way down, trying to keep a wriggling Monkey tucked under one arm while holding onto Poppy’s lead with the other.

By contrast my second trip up the hill with the A-team was a relaxing stroll, and that’s despite Beanie and Biggles working hard to take their lead tangling skills to the next level.

The youngsters hang out in the van…

while the A-Team show who are the real kings of hill climbing

Despite his tender age Monkey has demonstrated a remarkable talent for Poo Magic. This highly specialized subset of the performing arts involves the assisted removal of an unfeasibly long foreign body from one’s bum hole. Beanie is of course the world record holder with her 12 inch plastic shopping bag fragment, but earlier this week Monkey gave a very creditable roadside performance with an 8 inch object. Until I got my hand on the protruding end of it and started pulling I figured it was just a regular klingon, but that thing just kept on coming. I’ll never know for sure what it was – it was too coated in the brown stuff for me to see – but as Monkey likes nothing better than to sneak poo bags out of my pockets when he’s sat on my lap, that’s got to be my best guess.

This was such an impressive performance for a novice anal magician that it may have put Beanie’s nose out of joint, because she’s been off her main meals intermittently for a week or so. 

For many Beagle owners reluctance to eat at mealtimes is a sure sign of a health problem, but throughout her life Beanie has used it as an attention-grabbing tool. I felt certain that this time was no different, based mainly on the fact that I’d watched her turn her nose up at her bowl full of kibble, but spend ages trying to get a piece of the exact same kibble that escaped from Biggles’ bowl and rolled under the hall table. I was all set to use the time-honored “eat it now or I’ll take the bowl away” technique to get her eating again, but then Susan started Googling. Maybe Beanie really could be ill this time? Maybe she could be losing her sense of smell and finding kibble insufficiently appetizing? Yep, you guessed it: we got a vet appointment just to play it safe, and of course she passed it with flying colors. She may be 14 years old, but she still knows how to get us worried.

As for Biggles, well he’s having the time of his life, having finally solved a mystery that’s been troubling him for the last 13 years. You see whenever I go for a shower I lay out my fresh clothes, and when the water starts flowing and I’m safely tucked away in the cubicle, Biggles sneaks in and tries to nick my socks. He checks my top, my boxers, my pants, but until now he’s never found my fresh socks. That’s because I hide them by tucking them into the door handle on the inside of the bathroom door. Last Tuesday however, right after Poppy’s latest attempt to emulate the Andrew Puppy and run off with the loo roll, he came into the bathroom for a nose around, and discovered my socks. He’s a happy boy, and now I’m the one trying to find the missing socks.

As usual, here are a few more recent shots:

Poppy celebrated the end of her 10 day post-op fast from roughhousing by getting right back into it; no warm up, no bum sniffing preliminaries, just straight to straddling Monkey the wrong way round and pulling his tail. If she was shocked by how much bigger and stronger he’s become over those ten days, she didn’t show it, but the play was noticeably more balanced.

During Poppy’s convalescence her brother Monkey didn’t just get bigger and stronger, he also got better at controlling his pee factory, but that progress was won at the cost of many washing machine cycles. He peed on the floor, he peed on his toys, he peed in his crate and on one trip to the vet for a checkup for Poppy, he peed on Susan’s lap (to their shame, neither Beanie nor Biggles ever managed that one). It was very frustrating; he’d have a few days where his pee habit would seem to be improving, and then there’d be an absolute whiz-fest. Eventually we discovered why this was happening:

1. Monkey has not one, not two, but three bladders. I’m confident of this because I’ve seen him create two large puddles on the patio and deck in quick succession, yet still manage to wet the hall carpet just five minutes later.  All three bladders must be purged to avoid an accident.
2. Sending Monkey out into the garden at some crazy early hour in the morning with the instruction “go do your business” is no guarantee that the business in question will actually be done. The responsible humie must don clothing, shoes and a jacket and accompany Monkey outside with a torch to obtain VPC (Visual Pee Confirmation) in triplicate. Failing to do so leaves Monkey at risk of being distracted from his primary mission. There could be a poo to snack on, a plant that urgently need pruning, or even better a big pool of rain water to guzzle down to refill those extra bladders of his.
3. Doing the pat-down test on the bed of the crate is not a reliable method of detecting prior in-crate pee accidents. A resourceful Beagle boy such as Monkey is entirely capable of peeling up his bedding to reveal the plastic tray beneath, peeing onto that tray, then dropping the bedding back in place to hide the evidence.

Monkey caught me out with #3 for a good couple of nights before I solved the riddle of how his bed could feel dry, yet his crate (and the little boy it contained) could smell vaguely of pee.  We concluded that the whiz-fests were happening because once Monkey had a whiff of pee on his person – a dab of “eau de toilet” if you will – everywhere he went would smell of pee, and therefore everywhere was a legitimate pee location. It was kind of like that old song “Wherever I lay my hat, that’s my home”, except with puddles instead of a hat. Anyway once we figured out how things were going so wrong, we were able to make genuine progress. The little pee-monster still has three bladders of course, and there’s no getting round that.

As a special treat for Poppy after such a restricted 10 day lock down, we took her and the A-Team for a walk up Loudoun Hill. She coped with the short climb very easily, but seemed a little unsure of the etiquette for the ritual treat handout at the top.

The Beagle Book of Law contains a number of rules governing the delivery of treats at the top of a hill, but they all have a single common thread which is quite easy to memorize, and it’s this: Beanie gets the treats first. Every time. Or else.

Get down Biggles, I get first dibs!

Poppy also has a lot to learn about gratuitous woofing, but at least she has two very experienced coaches.

And of course Beanie is also qualified to teach the art of getting stuck in odd places

One essential Beagle skill that both Poppy and Monkey have already acquired is that of poo snacking. Currently they’ve yet to develop a taste for the droppings of random local dogs, instead preferring the high quality, home-grown stink bombs laid by Beanie and Biggles. It’s disturbingly common to see them pacing around members of the A-Team when they go out for their morning constitutional, pouncing on the fresh deposits as soon as they become available. When nature calls during a walk it’s a game of who’s quickest on the draw: can I get a poo bag on my hand and scoop before an eager puppy mouth beats me to it? If only I had the reflexes of a young Clint Eastwood. On the other hand, at least it’s taking longer to wear down my supply of bags. If you’re disgusted by any of that, take my advice: don’t get a Beagle!

To close this post, a few more shots:

The decision about when to spay a girl doglet; going before the first season is thought to reduce the risk of some cancers and increase the risk of others in certain breeds, and to be a cause of joint problems in larger dogs. Going after can expose the dog to the risk of phantom and actual pregnancy. We chose to have Poppy spayed at six months, prior to her first season – just as we did with Beanie. By a spooky coincidence the date of her operation landed on the first day that Monkey was cleared to go for walk in the big wide world; similarly when Beanie and Biggles were pups, Biggles got to have his first walk on the very day that Beanie was on the operating table having pieces of brittle, sharp plastic removed from her gut.

As expected Poppy’s spay operation went well, though she also needed a little fix to her umbilical hernia and the surgical removal of her baby canines (they were hanging on and obstructing the permanent teeth).

By contrast Monkey’s first outside walk was a drama-filled rollercoaster ride. It started cautiously, with Monkey being wary of traveling down our driveway on his own four paws instead of in someone’s arms. As we got to the end of the drive he suddenly gained confidence, and it was all “Oh yeah, I’ve got this. Follow me, I know what I’m doing!” Then we got to a road and he saw a big lorry pass by; apparently lorries are much scarier when you see them from low down on the pavement, and Monkey started having misgivings about this whole walk thing. Every time I got him convinced that everything was OK, we’d only get a few yards further before another vehicle drive-by sent his confidence crashing to the deck. I stuck with it, plying him with treats until he became less sensitive to the traffic, but our short walk was still punctuated with long pauses as Monkey tried to process his new experiences. He got back from his walk, ate well and slept deeply, and I collected our little girl from the vet. All went well that night, and then our ear-bursting ordeal started.

It’s a very big world when you’re just a little Monkey

Poppy came home to us with strict instructions to allow only short on-lead pee walks for the first three days and gentle well-controlled walks for the seven subsequent days to give her post-op wounds the best chance to heal. No more zoomies round the garden; no more leaping on and off the sofas, and most especially no more play sessions with Monkey. This was fine while she was still woozy from the anaesthetic, but on day 1 of her recovery and with a fresh dose of painkiller in her belly, she felt the need to vent about the restrictions with a low key but wearingly repetitive whimper. When I took our three other doglets out for their morning walk, the whimper turned into full volume wailing, which according to Susan, was sustained for the entire duration of our walk. Certainly I could hear it through the double-glazing on the way down our road and on the way back. The complaints died away on our return, but then Monkey began his own song of distress as his frustration at not being able to play with his big sister grew.

To appease them both – and most especially to give our ears a break – Susan prepared and distributed 4 filled kongs. For a few minutes there was peace, but only for a few minutes. Poppy launched into a new composition entitled “There’s a biccie at the end of my Kong and I can’t get it out”, and Monkey joined her shortly afterwards with his own cover of the same song. Never ones to miss out on a good sing-off, Beanie stunned the audience with “Count yourself lucky, my Kong’s empty” and Biggles answered that with “I haven’t a clue what everyone’s wailing about but I love the sound of my voice”.  Although Poppy and Monkey delivered the most emotional performances and Biggles gave the most warbling one, Beanie’s power ballad definitely won on volume.

Over then next few days things got noisier and noisier. Poppy delivered multiple Beaglese covers of Nik Kershaws’s most famous 1980’s hit, you know that one that goes “I’ve got it bad, you don’t know how bad I’ve got it”. Biggles was keen to voice his own unique composition “I’ve got a sock, two cow hooves and a Santa hat, how about that!”, while Beanie and Monkey never missed an opportunity to remind us they had the blues. At one point we got so sick of it we gave everyone some crate time and ordered a Chinese meal through the “Just Eat” service. Feeling a little recovered after our hit of E-numbers, fat and sugar, we let the little furry buggers out for more power-ballad practice before bed time. At some point Monkey and Poppy must have got access to our leftovers because later that evening Susan had to clean up two pees on the rug, a poo in the corner by our wood stove (all fairly normal), and a barf which was topped by a piece of fortune cookie wrapper (not so normal).

You’re looking stressed Dad. Just tickle it and you’ll feel better – or at least I will :)

In the midst of all this chaos I had to take the Beanie to see a canine physio for a checkup. She’d been showing signs of rear leg weakness and having a couple of staggering episodes over the last month so we just wanted to see if it was an early sign of something bad. As it turned out the Beanster was in remarkably good shape for a lady of advanced years. Her flexibility was right up there with some pups, and though one rear leg showed a little muscle wastage compared to the other, it was nothing extreme. I came away with a few balance and proprioception exercises to add to the strength exercises we’ve been doing for the last 2-3 years; hopefully they’ll help to keep her bombing along the beach for some time to come.

We’re now almost at the end of our ten day ordeal; Poppy gets a final checkup tomorrow and then we should be able to let her loose to play with her brother, after which peace will finally descend upon our house (always assuming Biggles doesn’t get hold of another sock or Santa hat).

To finish, here’s a few more recent shots:

When you can’t have this, you just have to amuse yourself

An oinking pink pig helps

Unlike Beanie, Biggles and Poppy, Monkey quite likes Kongs even when they’re empty.

And if things get really desperate you can try getting a humie to have a playful romp with you, although they don’t seem to like bitey-face games as much as Poppy

The Beanster always likes to worry us, but with a little extra work we should be able to keep her active and full of beans

Once this little boy’s got his playful sister back, all we have to do is get him over his nibble and pee habits and life will get a lot easier. How hard can that be?

Why are you grinning at that Poppy?