Large! (but little inside)

It’s fair to say that Daisy – like Poppy before her – is quite a small Beagle, but she’s made to seem even more diminutive when compared to her hulk of a brother. I haven’t weighed The Monkulus recently, but he was a shade below 20kg at his last weigh-in and must surely have topped that now, having muscled up continually over the last few months while remaining lean. To me he has the look and feel of a big dog, and this was confirmed when I ordered a new harness for him a few days ago; according to the size chart, he belongs firmly in the “Large” category. Even at his biggliest, Biggles only ever needed a medium harness, and I must admit I enjoyed selecting the proper big boy option from the dropdown list on the order form for Monkey.

For all his muscle and size The Monkster is still very much a little boy in his head, and most of the free space in that head is filled with nonsense. I think it’s quite common for humie children to go through a stage of running and jumping onto the bed for fear of having their ankles grabbed by the unseen monsters that lurk beneath. At almost 3 years old, Monkey has his own version of this; if he’s on the buffet in our lounge and wants to get onto the nearby sofa, the one thing he won’t do – under any circumstances – is step down onto the intervening floor; he must either cautiously stretch across the chasm of doom or be carried across like a big baby. I don’t know what dangers he imagines are lurking on that short section of floor, but the other night he attempted the stretch technique and it failed him disastrously. Just at the critical moment – with Monkey’s rear feet on the buffet and his front paws on the sofa cushion – the buffet slid further away. I was sat on the target sofa at the time and saw Monkey being stretched out longer and longer as he desperately tried to get enough purchase to bring his rear end forward to meet his front paws. It was a losing battle played out in slow motion, and it ended with Monkey belly-flopping unceremoniously onto the floor.

He was back up on the buffet like a shot before any dreaded floor monsters could get him, but he still needed to be on the sofa next to me and had lost all confidence that he could manage it himself. I got a whimper, then a paw, then more whimpers and those big, pleading eyes of his, and when I’d finished wasting my breath telling him that it was OK and that “look, Daisy can do it and nothing bad happens to her!”, I had to get off my bum, scoop him up in my arms and carry him over. It turns out that our old sofa was built well enough to take our combined mass dropping onto it; my attempt at a controlled touch-down was scuppered by my knees which really weren’t up for a weighted squat that late in the evening. I expected Monkey to struggle off my lap immediately on landing as Beanie & Biggles would have done, but there was no attempt to salvage any of his self-respect whatsoever; he just stayed cradled in my arms, letting me kiss his nose and tickle his tummy for a solid five minutes.

Daisy is very much lighter and seems to be immune to the floor-dwelling nasties that live between the buffet and the sofa, but she still has her own strange little habits. For example, most mornings when I open her crate she still won’t get out of it herself. She rolls onto her side, looking at me right in the eyes and wagging, and waits for me to kneel down and gently lift her out and into my arms, just as I did when she was a very young pup. She still squeaks and moans during the extraction process – again just as she did as a new pup – and of course I still squeak right along with her. It’s our little morning routine; it’s very silly, and I love it.