About this time last year I noted that Monkey had developed certain obsessions that set him apart from other dogs we’ve known, and as a result of those dodgy habits I called him a pervert. One year later on I can report that he’s no longer compelled to power-sniff any recently vacated seat for traces of anus, which is a good thing, and he’s a bit more inclined merely to sniff the pee markings left by other dogs, rather than desperately try to lick them up.

The “pervert” label still applies though, because he now gets inappropriately excited about furry blankies. Just the other day he was trying to make a bed on the sofa – badly of course, given that he learned his bedmaking skills from Biggles. I was sat with him on the sofa at the time, having difficulty drinking my coffee due to the vigorous tugging movements; periodically getting an arse thrust into my face didn’t help either. Keen to bring the exercise to a close while there was still a reasonable volume in my cup, I tried to help sort him out. During the course of this help he ended up getting tangled up in one of our excessively furry sofa throws, and became inappropriately giddy with excitement. It was very nearly one of those “oh, oh right..” moments; I suspect that if I hadn’t quickly pulled the throw off him and found alternative seating I’d have been treated to a really close-up view of Mr Pinky, although “Mr Big Red & Angry” would be a more fitting name for Monkey’s plonker.

He’s also started humping recently; he humps humie legs, he humps the sofas, and until her very recent spaying op he was showing worrying signs of wanting to hump Daisy. His mentor Biggles never humped anybody or anything, which makes Monkey our first humping male Beagle. Both of our previous girlies were enthusiastic humpers, and despite the fact that Monkey still has his own pair of blackberries, his hip thrusting pales in comparison to Beanie’s. To frame this in terms of popular music, a slow number by Barry White would be a good accompaniment for Monkey’s humping attempts; for Beanie, Motorhead’s Ace of Spades would be the only appropriate match, and even then it might be a slow. Since humping is such a common Beagle pastime it doesn’t in itself support my assertion that the Monkster is a pervert, but the silly wild-eyed look on his face during humping sessions absolutely does. I’ll need to get a shot of that sometime, but for now here’s a dump of some recent Monkey & Daisy moments.

In the lead up to getting Daisy, we contacted a Beagle-specific behaviorist called “The Beagle Lady” to help ensure that she and Monkey would get off to a good start, and indeed they did; as things are currently, I’d say they’re almost as tightly knit as Monkey and Poppy were. As I browsed the Beagle-lady’s other resources I saw a lot of material aimed at getting Beagles to behave themselves on walks, and I do remember Beanie & Biggles being an absolute nightmare for most of their lives in that respect.

When he became a solo Beagle, Monkey was stunningly well-behaved, walking for the most part with a loose lead and never lunging into the road for discarded food wrappers and such. He did, I must confess, have a bit of a “thing” for fast food paper napkins, especially if they were soaked in rain water and the various unsavoury “juices” that run along gutters on their way to the nearest drain. Despite that, walks with Monkey were – and I say this with a mixture of pride and disappointment – often uneventful to the point of being a little boring. That’s a shocking admission to make about a young male Beagle, especially one still in possession of his full pocket billiards set. Walks with Beanie & Biggles were never boring, even when they were old codgers and Beanie occasionally had to hitch a ride in her buggy.

Both fortunately and unfortunately, Monkey walks are certainly not boring now; Daisy has completely fixed that. A couple of days ago I had the most not boring Monkey walk ever, caused in part by an almost perfect storm of external events.

The outward leg of the walk was unremarkable; Daisy showed interest in a couple of napkins, and as I steered her away from them, Monkey deemed them too good to ignore and grabbed them. I extracted them from his mouth, only to have them snatched by Daisy. We had a few rounds of the pass-the-napkin game until I managed to trap it under my foot. Beyond that, nothing especially notable happened, until that is, we started on our way back.

While we’d been on our travels a local farmer had transported something smelly, and bits of that smelly something had fallen onto the road. Daisy and Monkey really, really wanted that stuff and began lunging off the edge of the pavement in an attempt to get it. Both of them were pulling like regular dogs rather than using the highly effective “spider-Beagle” technique favored by Beanie & Biggles; this is where a Beagle drops his or her body close to the ground and spreads out their limbs, making it much harder for the attending humie to resist the pull. Imperfect technique or not, Monkey and Daisy were still generating a lot of pulling power and I was really struggling to keep them on the pavement, so as soon as I could I diverted away from the main road into a nearby field.

This should have made the going much, much easier, but it didn’t. The pups suddenly got even harder to control because we’d just wandered onto fresh ferret tracks. Yes, you read that right. We have a pet ferret in our village who regularly goes for on-lead walks. He has his own little collar and harness, and kind of “flows” over obstacles as he’s walking. It’s very cute and cool to watch but it awakens the hunter within our Beagles. On this occasion the ferret had already departed the field, but he’d left scent trails behind which drove Monkey and Daisy crazy. They instantly acquired the spider-Beagling skill and Monkey was almost foaming at the mouth with excitement. I couldn’t wait to get them out of that field and back into a less stimulating and lead-straining enviroment.

When we did exit the field things got a little better, but not for long; while the farmer had been out and the ferret had been about, the council had chosen that moment to cut do a mass grass cut. If you’re a Beagle there are few things better than fresh cut grass; you can eat it, you can roll in it, and you can pee on it. Sometimes you might do all three of those things on the spot, and in any order. Monkey and Daisy were fully subscribed to that newsletter. The Monkster currently weighs in around 20kg – roughly twice the weight of Daisy – but I found it much easier to get him off the grass and moving again than his little companion; he at least stayed on his feet. By contrast, Daisy employed a walk-halting technique which I call “throwing out the anchor”. It’s something that Biggles used to do as a pup, and it goes like this: if a humie is trying to take you away from something you want, don’t pull against the lead, just drop onto your side, make defiant eye contact with the humie and wag your tail.

It’s a very effective technique, especially when other humies are around; as soon as they see it, they immediately make “Awwww” noises and come over to say hello. This simultaneously rewards the naughty behavior – making it more likely to recur – whilst also preventing me from getting Daisy back on her feet and moving again. I didn’t count how many anchor-stops we had on the final leg of our walk, but I’d normally expect to be back home in about five minutes and on this day it took about fifteen. My T-shirt was soaked in sweat from the effort by the time I finally got the two of them back into our garden, and they started hassling me for their breakfast even before I could get their harnesses off. Sometimes it’s hard being a servant to properly functioning naughty Beaglets, but I still prefer it to that brief period of well-behaved boringness.

For too long we’d neglected our crabapple tree in our garden, but over the last couple of years we’ve been pruning and feeding it to bring it back to a good state of health. This year it made an attempt at growing apples; sadly none have got to any decent size and some have already fallen, but those fallen ones have provided hours of entertainment for Daisy.

The rules of crabapple play are pretty simple. You throw it, you chase it, you roll on the ground next to it and howl at it, then pick it up and start all over again.

Monkey has no idea what the fuss it about; he sniffed the apples and deemed them unworthy of attention. As a mature Beagle he’s moved on from the silly obsessions of puppies, instead preferring to grab the loose end of a toilet roll and go sprinting around the house with it, or nick a gardening glove out of someone’s pocket and excitedly carry it to his open air laboratory.

Amazingly I planted around 80 new plants in the garden this week and between the crabapples and toilet paper and gloves, neither of these two numbskulls has had time to think about ripping them up. We haven’t even lost any plants to collateral damage from chases and playfighting, which is bordering on miraculous. And they say Beagles are hard work! What nonsense!