Just give me a nudge if I’m expected to stir

At midnight last night I awoke suddenly feeling decidedly unwell. I’d been heading towards ’something’ for about 4 days, and thought it was just a cold I was fighting off. Oddly, all the intitial symptoms of that ‘cold’ magically disappeared yesterday, so I was lulled into this foolish sense of having defeated the thing before it had even started, and even took my little fellow (pictured) out for a walk in the howling winds and rain just before dark. I was absolutely fine when I went to bed last night then, just an hour later, all things had changed. 

It’s the sort of thing that my mother might have labelled ‘gastric flu’. Which is probably as valid as her advice to ‘wrap up well or you’ll catch a cold’. (Did she really believe that’s how colds were caught, I wonder?) Anyway you get the picture: I’ve got aches & pains, a slight fever, sniffles, a monster headache………and the trots. At times like these I’m thankful that I work from home. 

The fellow above is B4 (actually it isn’t – that’s just an assumed name to protect the innocent). ‘B4′ because he’s my 4th beagle. I have a ‘thing’ for Beagles. The last three have all been rescue dogs, only the first one did I bring up from a young pup, and I still have all the chewed LP covers (‘vinyl’ to those too young to remember) and semi-devoured books still on my shelves. I suspect the person who first coined the phrase ‘dog eared’ must have also had a beagle that ate their books. 

‘B4′ came to me at 3 years of age, a full TWICE the recommended weight for a dog of his breed. 23.5kg instead of around 12kg.  He was a barrel, with a tiny head propped on the end of this great lumbering body, and he couldn’t even bend in the middle enough to be able to bite his own bum. Jump? Run? You must be joking.

Because his previous owners couldn’t control him they just fed him, and fed him, and fed him. And then they fed him some more. If someone came to the door, they’d throw him biscuits so that he didn’t root the visitor’s legs. If he started barking, they’d feed him because he couldn’t eat and bark at the same time. They’d give him a large marrow bone EVERY day, just to keep him out of mischief - and he, of course, would eat the lot at one sitting.

So, having accepted the challenge to adopt him, I plotted a course of diet and exercise that should have achieved his goal weight in about 12 months. A kilo a month was my aim; any faster and it might cause harm. As it turned out, it took 9 months, though I suspect that it wasn’t just the diet & exercise that got him into shape, but some strange sort of psychic weight transference. You see, in the time it took to shed his 12 kilos, I’d actually gained around the same amount.

Ironically ‘B4′ is the best behaved beagle I’ve ever had or known, so heaven’s knows how his previous owners would have coped with a dog with more typical beagle characteristics. And it’s the very beagle qualities that I so love that cause so many of them to be cast off at an early age. Independent spirits, headstrong, the bellowing voice of a hound, the love of exploration. It would help if beagles weren’t so damn attractive – so many people seem to acquire them on the basis of their looks alone, and then find that they have an untrainable monster on their hands by the time he reaches adolescence. Just look at the websites for the lost dog’s homes and such, and you will usually find a significantly higher number of beagles needing rehousing than most other breeds. There are now even dedicated beagle rescue services. That it has reached this level in Australia makes me wonder whether there should be ‘vetting’ procedures in place for potential beagle owners. If the truth be known, I’d be very much for a suitability test for every potential dog owner; there’s just so many dogs even in my own locality that aren’t adequately cared for. Don’t get me started on irresponsible dog owners, that’s a very BIG issue that’s close to my heart.

Anyway, I’ve sorted the mail, done the post run and now I’m heading off to a cosy spot on the sofa, hot drink in hand, right alongside a good friend of mine.