A while back I wrote that our older pups are more of a handful than our young ones. That is no longer the case due in no small part to Monkey’s conkers, or as I prefer to call them, his Spherical Ideas Department (SID). It’s plain that they’ve started talking to him – giving all manner of novel and often unwise suggestions – and he’s all ears.
Monkey’s most noteworthy SID-inspired projects include:
- Chowing down on toilet brushes and when apprehended by a humie, insisting on giving said humie a big slobbery kiss (because they really like that second-hand toilet brush juice).
- Stealing poo bags out of my trouser pocket. This in itself is hardly a unique Beagle project, but the skill level Monkey displays with his pick-pocketing is truly remarkable. He’s got a big, clumsy mouth but somehow he can sneak the bags out of my pocket without me feeling a thing. I only realise I’ve been hit when I hear the crinkling as he gets to work on his ill-gotten yet artfully obtained prizes.
- Sticking his head through the livestock fence we’ve erected around our vegetable growing area, and getting stuck.
- Wooing Beanie. This is one of the most dangerous things to come out of the Spherical Ideas Department, not least because the conkers-recommended wooing technique involves slapping Beanie’s head with a big heavy paw. In fairness this hasn’t got Monkey into trouble just yet, but as I keep reminding my boy: “There are old Monkeys and there are bold Monkeys, but there are no old, bold Monkeys that don’t have bite marks on their bottoms.”
- Peeing and pooing in the house. Yes, just as we thought Monkey had put his house-soiling habits to bed, the SID re-awakened them. The first of this new wave of accidents came shortly after I spotted Monkey un-weighting one of his rear legs during a pee. It was the beginning of a leg-cock, so maybe he was experimenting with territory marking; that would explain the peeing, but not the in-house number twos. Regardless, we seem to be getting the house-training back on track now.
- Shoulder-barging Biggles on a walk. Monkey is now – at six months old – bigger and heavier than Biggles(!), but Biggles was right up for a bit of manly shoulder-bumping and instantly responded in kind. This scared the hell out of Monkey, and the shoulder barging project was shelved thereafter. Maybe in his head Monkey still sees himself as a tiny pup, dwarfed and awed by the adult Beagles in his pack. Alternatively, maybe he realized that there’s a reason why Biggles often stands with his rear legs really wide apart: his balls may be virtual rather than physical but they’re enormous, giving the Bigglet a vastly superior Spherical Ideas Department. Competing with that level of silly would be like Justin Bieber trying to break Ozzy Osborne’s records for wrecking hotel rooms.
In spite of all this hormone-inspired silliness, we’ve decided that Monkey will retain his full pocket billiards set; for the most part he’s calmer and easier to handle than Biggles ever was, and not overly confident. Poppy of course has been spayed and never had any conkers to start with, but she’s still capable of coming up with her own naughty ideas. Like Beanie she loves to wreck plants, and when we put plastic green fencing around planting areas to protect them, she made it her mission to nibble her way through it and wreak havoc on the vulnerable seedlings within.
Back when we’d first got Poppy I entertained the idea that she was actually an alien – a Nibblosian from the Plant Nibble who could spawn more Beagles by doing a head stand in a plant pot. She’s now displaying another alien characteristic that could have come straight out of Ridley Scott most famous movie: she’s a face hugger. She likes nothing more than to climb onto a humie shoulder for a cuddle, and once there, cover the humie’s mouth and nose with her head and neck, stifling breathing. Seriously, I don’t think it would be wise to leave Poppy alone in a room with a sleeping baby or someone who wouldn’t be able to push her off their face!
EDIT: My idea of equating Biggles to Ozzy Osborne seems to have been about right. The day after I made this post, we went out to work on the garden without properly closing the kitchen baby gate. Some time later Susan spotted Biggles in the kitchen and sent me in to check on things, usher him back to the lounge and close the gate. As I stood in the doorway to the kitchen I didn’t see any overt signs of Biggly boy activity, but when I took a step inside I heard a crunching noise underfoot: broken glass. In fact Biggles had knocked two pint-sized glasses onto the floor, smashing them. As I cleaned that up I noticed a Jacobs Cream Cracker wrapper lying in the hall, and found a trail of crumbs all the way up the corridor to the bedroom. Clothes had been thrown around the bedroom floor, and in the ensuite the toilet roll holder had been ripped off the wall, but curiously the toilet roll itself was lying mostly undamaged on the floor. All that would have made for a respectable Ozzy-style wrecking session, but Biggles had left one more surprise for me: in the family bathroom off the hall there was an empty bag of sultanas. As it happened I knew for sure that the bag had been mostly empty prior to Biggles getting it because I’d put a handful of the remaining sultanas on my cereal that morning. No need for an emergency dash to the vet then, but this was nevertheless an impressive path of destruction and chaos for a nearly 14 year old Beagle boy, and it served as proof that even if you have no balls you can still have a spherical ideas department that’s the size of two small planets stuck together.
More shots from the last couple of weeks:
