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.

It’s now three weeks since either of us has had a Poppy moment, and three weeks since Monkey has had a chase or a cuddle with the smallest and best big sister in the world. Life resumed its familiar rhythm quite soon after we lost Beanie & Biggles; emotional time-outs happened when they had to, but between them we got on with things quite well. It’s been very different with Poppy; her sudden and wholly unexpected death knocked us clean off the rails. If you Google for articles on dealing with the loss of a pack member, many of them will tell you “.. and don’t forget to feed your other dog”. Seriously? After 16 years of having Beagle mealtimes as major events in every day, how could that ever happen? Well it very nearly did, and in response I actually wrote “Feed Monkey” on our whiteboard, scoring off each meal as I served it up so that he couldn’t possibly miss out.

One sunny morning I was working on the garden while Monkey sat alone on one of our loungers. Thoughts of Poppy interupted my flow and I slumped down on my heels for a moment and looked across to him. Without looking at me he dropped his head onto his front paws and let out a long, heavy sigh. It was a perfect summing up of how we were both feeling at that moment.

That’s not to say there haven’t been brighter moments in our days of course. Undoubtedly one of them was when Elmer – one of Monkey’s brothers – came through on the train with his mum Mimi. Early in their lives both Beanie & Biggles had sibling reunions but neither of them ever showed signs of recognition; as far as they were concerned they could have been meeting completely unrelated Beagles. This was not at all the case with Elmer and Monkey. There’s no way to know if they actually remembered each other, but certainly they were immediately and uncommonly at ease in each other’s company.  The positive effects of that reunion walk stayed with Monkey for the rest of that day; he was happier, more confident and more relaxed, and I can’t thank Mimi enough for bringing Elmer through.

Another memorable moment occurred when I took Monkey for a short jog around local farm fields. I had him on an extending lead and I was kind of letting him choose the route. We chased a rabbit at one point but the hunt was unsuccessful, and I can think of two possible reasons for our failure: (1) the big lumbering lump of humie to which Monkey was tethered was completely unfit for chasing down a wascally wabbit, and (2) Monkey has the mistaken belief that chasing something without baying one’s head off Biggles-style can have a successful outcome. Regardless, as our outing drew to a rabbit-free close Monkey figured it would be a good idea to leave the grass and run over a patch of solid, dry earth. It looked fine to me, and anyway Monkey was in charge, so we went for it. Two steps in my foot broke through the thin dry crust of earth and almost my entire lower leg vanished into mud. I burst out laughing and Monkey wagged furiously with a big grin on his face. I pushed hard with my other leg to get myself out, but it too plunged into the mud. I was now in a Beagle-style predicament, and I considered my options. If Biggles had been with me he’d have councilled me to stay very still and quiet until some other humie came along to sort it out. Monkey favours a completely different approach which can be summed up in one word: howl! I didn’t feel that either of these approaches was actually going to get me out of the mud anytime soon, but just then a nature documentary from years ago popped into my head. It featured the “Jesus Lizard” – a reptile that can actually lift itself up out of water and run on the surface. I weigh a lot more than that lizard and I’m a lot, lot slower, but the principle is the same: take steps as rapidly as possible and as long as each new step sinks a bit less than the last, you’ll make it to the surface. And so I did, but my shoes were (and still are, to be honest) caked in mud and smelling like cow poop, so much so that later in the day Monkey grabbed one of them and took it for a triumphal sprint round the garden.

Anyway, after all that verbiage, it’s time to get to back to what this post is supposed to be about: Poppyisms, or all those little quirks that made Poppy such a great little character.

This One

I’ve already mentioned Poppy’s assertive paw press to identify any door or baby gate that stands in her way, but in due course she developed a variant of “This one”, which I called “This One With Urgency”. It was used most frequently when her special home-cooked food had just been placed in the lounge, and she was on the wrong side of the gate.

Frightened Rat

At one point in the Poppy era we got a rat in the house; actually it came up from the foundations when I lifted floor boards to have a nosy. When disturbed, it would run from one room to another at remarkable speed. I can therefore claim without exaggeration that every morning, when her first breakfast had just been served, Poppy could exit her crate and sprint to her bowl faster than that frightened rat.

Death By Asphyxia

As noted in a previous post, Poppy would love to climb onto Susan’s left shoulder and press – really firmly – her ear against Susan’s mouth and nose, thereby posing a genuine suffocation risk. Having failed to starve her mum of oxygen, she often then move to alower position, but always find a suitable chin-rest so that she could gaze into Susan’s eyes before napping.

Spies Across The Bridge

I’ve seen a spy movie where the opposing sides would exchange captives across a bridge, with the instruction “eyes ahead, keep moving”. A similar thing would happen each night when Poppy and Monkey agreed to swap hooves; each would take slow deliberate steps away from their own hoof towards the other one.

Are you really using that chew?

Many years ago when I was at uni getting food from the canteen, we would each be allowed a single bread roll. Som epeople would actually have preferred two rolls, while others didn’t want one at all. A meme soon started up based around the phrase “are you really uisng that roll?”. Poppy had her own version of this; on occasions when she’d lost interest in her chew, she would go and stand over Monkey as he happily lay with his between his paws, not necessarily chewing it. No glances or verbal communication would be exchanged, but the meaning was clear: “Are you really using that chew?”

The garden of many fences

We have a special area in our garden where we grow fruit and veg, and we’d prefer not to have any Beagles getting in there to sample said edibles without permission. I ringed with area first with gridded cattle fencing; it kept Beanie, Biggles and Monkey out, but Poppy was small enough to squeeze through the gaps. “No problem” I thought, “I’ll just close up her entry points by criss-crossing some cord”. She nibbled her way through. “OK, I’ll use gardening wire”. She nibbled through that too. “Heavy wire then, that’ll work!”. She didn’t nibble through that, but somehow she could still get in to nick stuff. In the end, after nearly doubling the cost of the fence by buying a succession of cord and wire, I ended up spending even more to double-fence the whole thing. That finally worked, but I learned never to underestimate The Popster.

Time

One of the early changes we made to hold back Poppy’s epilepsy was to go to four Beagle meal times each day, spaced so as to have no long fasts in any day. In the hour before her bedtime meal, Poppy would watch me like a hawk. If I got out of my seat for any reason she would sprint past me and camp out at the kitchen baby gate, indicating “This one with urgency!!!” with her paw. I had to tell her “No Poppy, it’s not time yet.” She quickly learned that phrase and would reluctantly head back into lounge, ready to go again if I gave any signs I might be getting her supper. Later on when she came to trust that I would never let her miss her supper, she might go for a nap in our bed instead of watching me overtly, but she never came out of yellow alert. No matter how deeply asleep she seemed to be, all I had to say – however quietly – was “Poppy, it’s time” and there’d be a mad scramble out of bed.

Sleeping Beauty

After a trip in the van it normally fell to me to get the pups out of their travel crates and back into the house. The instant I unlatched Monkey’s crate he’d be out, but Poppy would stay in her crate until I stuck my head in there and gave her a kiss on her nose.

Unwrapping Christmas

I’ll never forget Poppy’s first Christmas dinner. Instead of just diving into her bowl and devouring its contents in a frenzy like a regular Beagle, she carefully lifted out all the components of her meal – the veg items, a sausage, a piece of turkey  and so on – and organised them on the floor. Once she’d surveyed everything she then began consumption, nibbling her way through the items in a very thoughtful, planned way.

Not everyone likes their own brand

Remember that scene in one of the Austin Powers films where Fat Bastard drops one and states “Oh everyone likes their own brand, don’t they?”. Poppy didn’t. She would make a sharp exit any time she did a particularly vile air-poop, and we soon learned to hold our breath if she scarpered to the other side of the room.

Yeehawwww!

Like Beanie before her, Poppy liked to hump her brother. Poppy’s humping style was more laid back than Beanie’s, and we often joked about getting her a little cowboy outfit for her Monkey-riding sessions.

Potato Obsession

Poppy liked vegetables more than any of our other Beagles, but she was particularly crazy about Jerusalem Artichoke tubers (also known as “Fartichokes” due to their effect on the gut), and potatoes. Poppy just loved potatoes and would always try to dig them up from our potato beds and nick them from the shed after we’d just had a harvest.

When we buried her we put a fresh seed potato in her little bundle, along with her little red dumbbell which was her first ever toy.