Perfect Storm

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.