Do you ever get peed-off about all those products that never come close to delivering their promised service life? Daisy certainly does, but her frustration isn’t focused on LED lightbulbs, TVs or devices with non-replaceable batteries; for her, it’s about moths. She got what she thought was a really good one. It didn’t fly, but it kept flapping its wings and doing unpredictable dances on the floor, and Daisy loved it. Again and again she drew back and pounced on it and gently picked it up in her mouth. She threw it into the air and caught it, then rolled onto her back, delicately holding it between her front paws, gazing at it in innocent wonder.

In the above video imagine that the severed giraffe body part is actually a moth, and you’ll be getting close to what I saw :)

Then abruptly the blummin’ thing stopped working! Moths are supposed to last for days, sometimes weeks, but this one had packed in after a just a few minutes’ play. Worse still it had no support website, and Daisy being Daisy, even if it had come with a paper receipt she’d almost certainly have ripped it up and swallowed it. There was no way to get a refund or a replacement now, and she was not happy! She howled and woofed at it, but to no avail. I picked it up and flushed it down the loo, but in doing so I left the door open just long enough for her to dart in and nick a toilet roll, so at least the day didn’t end too badly.

Monkey on other hand had a very positive experience with a product I’d almost forgotten we had: single-use instant cold packs. We originally bought them as a possible aid for Poppy during seizures, but since we lost her they’d just been taking up space in a cupboard – until Monkey came in from the garden one evening obviously feeling the heat. It had been hot, sunny day, and for most of it Monkey and Daisy had just been snoozing in the shade. When the sun eased up a little, the Beagle Brain Trust went down into the garden and decided to make up for all that lost chase and wrestling  time.

Monkey of course is every bit as fit as Daisy, but he’s also twice her weight and prone to getting very, very excited by a chase, so when they came in he was panting heavily; even lying on the cool wood floor wasn’t helping him much. The cold packs popped into my head, so I dug one out and struggled to read the instructions without my glasses. It said something about folding the pack to burst the inner bag. I half expected to burst the whole damn thing and end up spraying myself, the furniture and the walls with nasty chemicals, but fortunately all that happened was that the pack started cooling in my hand. I held it in his lordship’s most accessible armpit, and he liked it. I did the other armpit, and he liked it even more, in fact he liked it so much that he now rolled onto his back, legs akimbo, inviting me to put the pack in his groin. I did so, and very quickly I got the impression that Monkey was liking it a bit too much. I want to stress that at no point did Mr Pinky crash the party, but there were signs that we’d left the PG rating behind and were heading into 18 territory.

As I keep telling people, Monkey has the most loving and gentle nature, but he is also a raving pervert. I withdrew the cold pack before my legs got humped and noted that Monkey had stopped panting, though it was unclear whether this was due to distraction or genuine cooling effects.

As we’re now into August, I have an excuse to do a photo dump for the latter half of July.

Our crab apple tree is losing leaves a little early again, which is of concern to Daisy!

On the other hand, those fallen leaves are great to roll on..

Biccie time!

On hot days we do a bit of this..


And a bit of this..


And then a bit of this…

The Monkey and Daisy double-decker: (1) above the table..


..and (2) below the table.

Not to rush you Monkey but.. exactly when will you be finished with that ball?

..And how come your bit of trampled foliage is better than mine?

Clearly the Silly Ideas Department has just sent a new memo!

Cute

Handsome

Cuddly

Just before Beanie & Biggles’ old wooden agility jumps rotted away completely, I made a new pair using fresh pressure-treated wood, and then I completely forgot I had them – until last week that is.

Monkey has only had a handful of jump training sessions, but he still remembered how it all works. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten just how high Monkey jumps – even when the bar is on the lowest peg – so I got a lot of shots of Monkey almost out of the frame.

I have a sneaking suspicion that he jumps so high because he deeply mistrusts the bar; it’s clearly a potential agent of Monkeycide. The same goes for the little streams that sometimes form on the beach as the tide is changing – they may only be a couple of inches wide, but he clears them by two feet, just to play it safe. It’s impressive for sure, but at the same time just a bit silly, but then so is Monkey.

Daisy seemed to be watching Monkey’s jumps carefully so I was hopeful for a first go triumph, but when it came to her turn she just limbo-danced under the bar. I realised I had to block this to make any progress, so I lowered the bar onto the feet of the jump and used her favorite fetch ball as a target just for good measure. This time she hopped over the bar as I wanted, grabbed her ball and brought it to me. Perfect! I popped the bar back up and gave her another go, and this time she executed a proper jump! I was very chuffed at her performance so I rewarded her well, and for the next few minutes she was going back and forth over the bar for the joy of it.

It seems Daisy’s a very quick study, albeit with a blindspot for the whole “this food is yours, but this is mine” principle. I mean even Beanie showed us some respect when we were trying to feed our faces, although there was that time with the cake and that amazing prehensile tongue of hers…

At some point after we’d moved to our current house we handed out some of the more exotic treat options to Beanie & Biggles, something better than mere biccies. Rather than chew them on the spot, the dynamic duo decided it would be better to race down the garden and consume them on the flat, lower part with the rear fence at their backs. This very quickly became a habit, and the habit turned into a tradition; Monkey learned it from the two Bs, and he in turn has taught it to Daisy. It’s just what you have to do when you get something a bit special.

It’s very comforting to see this little tradition continuing, a bit like putting on an old pair of slippers – not that I have slippers and if I did, I doubt they’d last very long with Monkey & Daisy in the house. By contrast, some other longstanding traditions have been firmly and unexpectedly broken over the last couple of weeks. The first break was delivered by Monkey. Having received special dispensation from Princess Daisy to have a go at her latest rolling spot, Monkey didn’t just give it a go, he gave it a go and a half. A fox had left a small poop in the garden, and while Daisy merely daubed a bit of this pungent eau-de-toilet on her neck and shoulder, Monkey came up from the garden covered in it. His head, his shoulders, his chest and his front legs, all were visually and nasally contaminated, and I realised it was time for Monkey to experience something that always filled Beanie and Biggles with the utmost dread: bathtime.

Err.. bathtime.. should I be concerned?

Up to this point, Monkey had got through nearly 4 years of life without ever having a bath. He’d had wipe-downs with wet flannels and hadn’t liked them one little bit, but he’d never had an honest-to-goodness feet-in-the-drink proper bathing experience. I was convinced he’d view it as a drowning attempt – Monkeycide – and at a minimum I was going to get soaked, the bathroom floor was going to get flooded, and one or both of us would get an injury as I lowered 20kg of powerful, struggling Monkey into a watery doom. As it turned out, he didn’t struggle at all, in fact he took it completely in his stride. Getting him in the bath was still hard simply because I had no desire to coat myself in secondhand fox-poo and so had to lift him at arm’s length, but he didn’t panic once. Who’d have thunk it: a Beagle that likes bathtime, or at least tolerates it without making a fuss, and that it should be the very same Beagle who hides under the lounge table at bedtime when he sees a doggy toothbrush in my hand!

Yesterday Daisy pulled off something even more remarkable than Monkey’s panic-free bathing experience: she caught an actual living thing. Throughout their lives Biggles and Beanie (especially) tried to prove their hunting prowess but failed dismally. Their idea of a stealth attack involved screeching at full volume while they were still 50 yards from their prey, and they never caught anything that was actually alive, save for the odd insect (and even then it was more by accident than skill). Monkey follows their example; he makes a big show of sprinting after the squirrel that frequents our garden, but he only launches his attack once the squirrel has already climbed out of reach. Perhaps he doesn’t really want to catch it; he just enjoys the chase. His predatorial ineptitude is a blessing, because (1) it’s entertaining to watch and (2) it allows us to avoid the less pleasant realities of nature.  Daisy of course never had Beanie & Biggles to show her how hunting should be done, so she did it wrong and caught herself a baby mole.

I’d just staggered out of bed after a lie-in with the pups, and I let them into the garden as I went to get dressed and prepare my breakfast. As is my habit I kept checking on Monkey and Daisy from the kitchen window, and I noticed some very odd behavior from Daisy. She was sat bolt upright at the bottom of the garden, not slouching in a lazy puppy-sit as she usually does; it looked like she was guarding something. Monkey was very curious, but each time he approached Daisy, she hurriedly picked that something up off the ground and distanced herself from him. It was obvious that whatever she had was valuable and not to be shared, and therefore probably disgusting or dangerous or both; I had no choice but to put my breakfast on hold and investigate. I found it difficult to close the distance on Daisy without spooking her, but after a few attempts I resorted to the oldest trick in the book: I stuck my hand in my pocket and made it look like I was hunting for a biccie while I approached. I got just close enough to see the mole before Daisy once again picked it up and scarpered; it was still alive, able to move a little but injured and incapable of escaping. I’ll spare you the details, but I eventually convinced Daisy to let me take the mole and “take care of business”.

Having broken one tradition, Daisy has balanced things out by creating a whole new one of her own. On walks where we pass a low garden wall, she’s taken to jumping up and walking along it. In itself that’s nothing special – Beanie & Biggles used to do that all the time – but Daisy’s innovation is to stop at the end of the wall and entice me to pick her up, give her a cuddle, then carefully lower her back to terra firma. She’s definitely not afraid to jump down (she does much bigger jumps off the table on our deck, especially when she’s nicked something) so I have to conclude that it’s all about the cuddle, and the body language and eye contact she uses are just the same as when she wants a tummy tickle. I don’t know who loves it more – me or Daisy – but I do love it a lot.

As it’s the end of June, here’s a dump of all the photos I haven’t used yet.

Dappled shade: the perfect nap-inducing combo of heat without overheating

Another popular tradition: cardboard shredding, especially if the vacuum cleaner’s just been put away

Daisy looking pretty..

..And Monkey looking silly

The kind of silly that only a Beagle boy can do properly

The flowers are showing in force now..

Daisy’s lying in wait for another mole

Monkey’s busy not catching the squirrel, but enjoying it anyway

And when they’ve scared off the critters, they can still chase each other

It can be exhausting sometimes

You definitely need..

..a bit of chill time every so often

But life is good

Though of course it would be even better if it was teatime already