A lot of things have happened since my last post, all of them good; probably the most important one is that Monkey and Daisy are absolutely best buddies now. There have been little some little wrinkles to smooth out, but they’ve worked a lot of things out for themselves, and I think we’ve helped sort out the rest.

One little wrinkle was that for one day and one day only, Daisy got it into her head that Monkey’s balls are there primarily as a teething aid. Seriously, every time they started playing he’d end up curling his tail in tight and heading for high ground to escape further nad-nibbles. In golden era Dr Who if you wanted to escape a Dalek, you could just run up a flight of steps. Unfortunately for Monkey, furry Daleks like Daisy can do steps with ease. They can also nibble through the underside of the hammock-style chair on our deck.

They can’t do tables though, and consequently we found Monkey on top of our deck table often enough that we put a thick blanket on there to help cushion him.

Clearly it would take more than just a blanket to fix this situation, so we changed both their crate routines a little to give Monkey more solo time, we lifted and held Daisy if she persisted in snacking on monkey nuts, and I’m sure there was some element of doggy negotiation going in there too. I don’t know what did the trick, but something did and by the next day Monkey’s balls were off the menu. From this point on, Monkey and Daisy grew closer and closer every time they were together. Daisy learned how to call a halt to play if Monkey started getting too intense, Monkey got much better at toning things down for Daisy, and we started seeing more calm, snuggly moments between them. As I write this they still haven’t snuggled down together for  nap, but they’ve come very close. One morning I had Monkey sprawled across my lap, with Daisy resting her chin on his back. Their breathing rates changed as they started to drift off, and then a delivery guy rolled up to the house and instantly broke the magic. It will happen soon, I’m certain of it.

A sure sign that they’ve bonded deeply is that they’ve joined forces in attacking the fencing around our more fragile vegetables. Once again I’ve been drawn into a Caddyshack-style battle of wits to keep them out. At first it was Monkey doing all the hard work with Daisy just tagging along, but now she’s taking a more active role, digging and creating new entry points that Monkey’s more than happy to use. At one point she wrenched a couple of tent pegs out of the ground that had been holding the fencing tought, and then bent the fence inwards to gain access to our potatoes. To me this seemed like a remarkable display of strength for such a little pup, but then Susan reminded me of Beanie’s antics soon after we brought her home; she easily and enthusiastically ripped away all the chicken wire I’d stapled over the gaps in the fence at our old house. Never underestimate the power of a determined Beagle, no matter how young & titchy they are!

While Daisy isn’t yet house-trained, we are spending far less time having  to clean up accidents. This is due in part to an additional three-day worming program with Panacur rather than our usual, Drontal-style wormer. It turns out Drontal isn’t that great at clearing up giardia infections. If you’ve got a pup with diarrhoea or watery poops, sometimes with a tiny hint of blood in them, and Drontal helps for about two days but then the symptoms quickly return, there’s good chance that pup has a gut full of giardia.

Though most of her in-crate accidents have stopped, Daisy’s little squeaky/moany commentaries haven’t; for us they’ve become her most distinguishing characteristic, every bit the equal of Poppy’s “This one!” paw action and Monkey’s cries of “It’s Monkeycide!”. While Daisy has a soundtrack for just about everything she does in a day, by far the best squeakage happens when she’s emerging from her crate after a nap. There are faltering, uncertain squeaks as she’s finding her feet and casting off the anaesthetic of sleep. The noises change, alerting the listener to the feeling of pressure in her bladder; a crescendo is reached as she crosses the crate boundary, conveying the urgency of the situation and the desperate hope for a puddle-free resolution. If containment is then lost on the very cusp of salvation, the abrupt downturn in the squeaking perfectly captures the pathos of the moment. It’s become such a thing that we squeak and moan along with her, joining in the audio rollercoaster. One time when I was down at the bottom of the garden and Susan was bringing Daisy out for an emergency pee, Daisy and Susan were squeaking loudly from the deck and though some distance away, I joined in too. The neighbours must have heard it, and if they had any doubts that we’re more than a little weird, well those doubts are history now.

To finish, some more shots from recent days and a little video of Monkey and Daisy playing:

We’ve had Daisy home with us now for over 10 days. Things are going incredibly well, and we’re besotted with her.

In many ways she’s becoming Monkey’s very own “Mini-Me”. Every (dry) morning he goes out onto the patio and pauses for a moment to give the garden and the farm field opposite a visual survey. He stands heroically, chest out and nose raised, and right next to him there’s a little 3.7kg pipsqueak copying his every move. He then goes down into the garden to carry out a painstaking perimeter check and his understudy is with him every step of the way.

Give Daisy a treat and there’s a pretty good chance she’ll play with it for 5 minutes before eating it – just like Monkey – and when she scratches, she generally stands on three legs instead of sitting down, another move she’s copied from her mentor. Their bond grows deeper every day; Monkey gets into a bit of panic if he nods off or gets distracted and loses sight of her, and they both sleep more soundly when they’re side-by-side in their crates in our bedroom.

There are really only two situations where we generally step in to avoid anything going wrong; the first is during play. Both Daisy and Monkey really want to play together, and the type of play they most want is chasing, but there are problems with that. If Monkey leads the chase, Daisy gets so fired up to follow him that she could do something silly like like leap off the patio and hurt herself. Conversely if Daisy leads the chase, Monkey sometimes forgets himself and begins treating her like Poppy, and Daisy gets overwhelmed and runs for shelter. That sounds worse than it is; Monkey’s really gentle but he moves abruptly, springing from one position to the next, and Daisy was very sensitive to sudden movement when she first came to us. If I saw her getting a little too close to the edge of the patio and quickly moved to block her, she’d cower; if kids saw her on a walk and ran up to meet her, she’d freeze and pee herself. Thanks in no small part to Monkey she’s getting used to sudden, rapid movement, but she still gets in over her head sometimes and we step in accordingly. That said, Daisy is a cheeky little girl who will bend the rules to win. One one occasion she started play but sought refuge under one of our garden chairs when the Monkey juggernaut got excited. He screeched to a halt in front of the chair looking thoroughly confused, at which point she darted out, kissed him on the nose and shot right back under the chair.

The second step-in situation is where Monkey has something, and Daisy wants it. Monkey is incredibly tolerant of girls nicking his stuff; as an adult Poppy used to do it all the time, but Daisy is a little pup who’s unafraid to test boundaries and we don’t want this to tilt into bullying, or to push Monkey so far that he eventually has no choice but to tell her off. At the same time, Daisy has to learn to respect other dogs, and Monkey has his part to play in this. As it turns out, Daisy seems to be quite good at taking cues from Monkey, but when she seems to be ignoring them we do intervene. Hopefully we’re getting this right.

We haven’t quite had them cuddling up together for a nap yet, but Monkey invites it very frequently and often chooses to lie close to Daisy, so it surely can’t be far away.

As I noted in the previous post, Daisy was a bit reluctant to eat her food at first. My first thought on seeing this was that she was taking a leaf out of Beanie’s playbook; she’d sensed that I really wanted her to eat and was testing out her humie leverage options. Eager to get her eating but just as keen to avoid being taken for suckers by Beanie 2.0, we went as far as changing her kibble, but we also made that kibble the one and only food item available to her. That helped, but she still wasn’t as eager to finish her meals as we’d have liked. After observing her carefully Susan felt that Daisy wasn’t pulling a Beanie on us, but was just distracted and overwhelmed by the exciting new world that had opened up to her; she just needed somewhere calm and free of distractions at mealtimes. We designated the spare room as Daisy’s personal “sensory deprivation restaurant” and served all Daisy’s subsequent meals there. It didn’t work brilliantly at first, but then we hadn’t quite implemented the sensory deprivation aspect well enough; there were a couple of dust bunnies under the bed and these made the most excellent play things – far more fun than chowing down on kibble. Also more fun than kibble was biting exercise bands, running round the bath and limboing underneath my homemade “landmine” bar. Once we got these things out of the way her eating became much more reliable and she now chows down without hesitation.

OK, I should also confess that we bought some wet food pouches and mixed these in with the kibble.

In the lead up to Daisy day we made the rule that no matter how cute Daisy might be, Monkey must never feel that she’s hogging the attention. In practice there’s not much danger of that; Monkey is behaving so well towards Daisy that he’s constantly getting showered with extra cuddles, praise and treats, and of course he still gets one-to-one attention on longer walks because Daisy’s not ready for them yet. I’ve also taken him on a couple of special missions to Pets At Home, the first of which was finally to clear out the remaining bags of Burns food left over from Beanie & Biggles, and the MCT-laden Neurocare that we got for Poppy but never really used. It turns out that Pets At Home take food donations – individual cans and pouches as well as kibble bags – and get them to Blue Cross who look after pets that don’t lead the same lives as pampered Beagles. It seemed very right that Monkey should be with me as I took those bags in, and he behaved impeccably well in the store; while I was concentrating on steering our heavily-laden, wonky-wheeled flatbed trolley round to the charity drop-off point he could easily have pulled on his lead and raided the shelves, but he didn’t, not even once. I’m immensely proud of our boy, and its wonderful to see him truly happy again now that we’ve got Daisy.

Side-by-side hoof chewing makes for a quiet, contented evening

Daisy has acquired Monkey’s obsession with gloves…

..and after just one coaching session from Monkey, Daisy passes the all-important Digging 101 Practical Exam

Chairs make shaded cool spots for cheeky little Beagle girls

Daisy’s our first Beagle with markings on her tummy. It’s going to fun seeing how she turns out!

When Daisy’s in bed, Monkey gets solo play, and nothing beats a 10 minute session with the lunge whip

Happy little boy..

..and a happy little pipsqueak

Poppy was tiny for a Beagle but her sudden loss left a big hole in our lives, especially coming so soon after saying goodbye to Beanie & Biggles. In the space of three months Monkey went from being part of a four Beagle pack to being an only dog; over the last month he has kind of adapted to life alone, but that life is a huge downgrade on what he had before.

We arranged various Beagle meet-ups to help him along, but what he and we really needed is.. well.. this:

Her name is Daisy, and we took her home on the 15th after her breeder very kindly brought her up from England on her way to judge at the Scottish Kennel Club competition. We met up in a service station car park, and it’s fortunate that Scottish Police forces are spending all their resources investigating “hate” crimes just now, otherwise we’d probably have been arrested on suspicion of drug dealing. I had an envelope filled with unmarked notes and was likely behaving very suspiciously as I kept an eye out for the breeder’s car. You can just imagine the conversation:

PC Copper: “So what’s all this then?”
Me: “I’m buying a Beagle.”
PC Copper: “Oh so that’s what they call it now, is it sir? Come with me, you’re nicked!”

As it was, we got home without being arrested and now 48 hrs on, things are shaping up very well.

Daisy was a bit subdued at first, which was to be expected given that she’d just had a big round of vaccinations, left the only home she’d known, gone a long journey and ended up in a strange house with a big strange Beagle boy and an even stranger pair of humies. Still, she got to check out her new garden, meet her new big brother and have a stress-relieving chew on a fresh cow hoof.

Almost inevitably given all that’s happened over the first few months of this year, we found a few things to worry ourselves about. The first was that Daisy seemed reluctant to eat her primary food, despite being quite enthusiastic about puppy training treats. Susan cooked up some scrambled egg as a stop-gap and that was devoured in short order, but the kibble remained a hard sell. Beanie pulled the same trick on us years ago so we were keen to avoid falling for it again; we switched to the puppy version of the food Monkey is currently thriving on, and swapped Daisy’s tasty training treats for pieces of the same kibble. This seems to be working; Daisy is now eating all of her meals except for the supper one.

Another worry centred around her poos; they’ve been very loose (understandable given her relocation and recent vaccination), but she has sometimes passed a tiny drop of blood at the end of them. This is however on the retreat, and again likely a reaction to her meds and all the upheaval of coming to a new home.

Finally, Daisy got a little scare when Monkey celebrated her arrival by bombing around the garden the way he used to do with Poppy. He’s a big, powerful boy and sounds more like a horse than a Beagle when he’s going at full tilt! Monkey immediately felt bad about this and we made things worse by rushing to protect Daisy, but we’ve calmed down, he’s calmed down and now he and Daisy seem to be growing together nicely. I’m hopeful I’ll be posting a photo of them snuggling together before long.

In between our new puppy parent worries there have been some absolutely wonderful moments. For example, last night before her bed Daisy was on our deck while Monkey was on the patio below. They locked eyes, rapid wagging started and Monkey climbed onto a bench so that he could touch noses with Daisy through the deck railings, before trotting up the stairs to join her. Today we’ve spent time at the bottom of the garden with a Beagle on each lap, giving tummy tickles, ear rubs and bonce kisses.

There have also of course been some gross and entertaining moments. Whenever I get Daisy out of her crate I know I’ve only got the briefest of windows to get her through the kitchen and out into the garden before the floodgates open. To heighten the sense of urgency Daisy produces her own countdown the instant I pick her up; there are little squeaks and moans building in volume and frequency with each passing second. If she suddenly goes quiet I’ve taken too long and it’s time to get the mop out and change to dry socks yet again. And of course those loose bowel movements have kept the washing machine busy refreshing old towels and soiled bedding.

It’s still early days but it feels like we’re a family again, and I think Daisy’s going to be an amazing little girl; not a replacement for Poppy, but a worthy successor.