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.

About this time last year I noted that Monkey had developed certain obsessions that set him apart from other dogs we’ve known, and as a result of those dodgy habits I called him a pervert. One year later on I can report that he’s no longer compelled to power-sniff any recently vacated seat for traces of anus, which is a good thing, and he’s a bit more inclined merely to sniff the pee markings left by other dogs, rather than desperately try to lick them up.

The “pervert” label still applies though, because he now gets inappropriately excited about furry blankies. Just the other day he was trying to make a bed on the sofa – badly of course, given that he learned his bedmaking skills from Biggles. I was sat with him on the sofa at the time, having difficulty drinking my coffee due to the vigorous tugging movements; periodically getting an arse thrust into my face didn’t help either. Keen to bring the exercise to a close while there was still a reasonable volume in my cup, I tried to help sort him out. During the course of this help he ended up getting tangled up in one of our excessively furry sofa throws, and became inappropriately giddy with excitement. It was very nearly one of those “oh, oh right..” moments; I suspect that if I hadn’t quickly pulled the throw off him and found alternative seating I’d have been treated to a really close-up view of Mr Pinky, although “Mr Big Red & Angry” would be a more fitting name for Monkey’s plonker.

He’s also started humping recently; he humps humie legs, he humps the sofas, and until her very recent spaying op he was showing worrying signs of wanting to hump Daisy. His mentor Biggles never humped anybody or anything, which makes Monkey our first humping male Beagle. Both of our previous girlies were enthusiastic humpers, and despite the fact that Monkey still has his own pair of blackberries, his hip thrusting pales in comparison to Beanie’s. To frame this in terms of popular music, a slow number by Barry White would be a good accompaniment for Monkey’s humping attempts; for Beanie, Motorhead’s Ace of Spades would be the only appropriate match, and even then it might be a slow. Since humping is such a common Beagle pastime it doesn’t in itself support my assertion that the Monkster is a pervert, but the silly wild-eyed look on his face during humping sessions absolutely does. I’ll need to get a shot of that sometime, but for now here’s a dump of some recent Monkey & Daisy moments.

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.