The Hill of Beagle Eating

There is a hill at our dog park that swallows beagles, sometimes for extended periods of time. Its fenced at the top, and around parts of the bottom, but not all the way around. Plus, there are holes in the fence at the top.

There is one section coming up the side of the hill, just after the fence ends, that has a number of little trails running up. June loves to go up these trails (which are not navigable by anything larger than a Lab) and go off exploring the underbrush.

Larry sometimes follows her, but doesn’t stay long. We’ve seen a number of other dogs go up and come back down of their own free will within minutes. Not so for June.

She will go up that trail and stay on that hillside. It usually takes 5 minutes or more of us calling her and starting to walk away before she decides to come down. But at least us walking away motivates her. Not so much for other beagles.

We were there one day a couple weeks ago, and the entire time, we could hear a beagle on that hillside. He didn’t sound completely happy, baying a fairly regular intervals. We caught a glimpse of him when Junebug ran up the hill for her foray into the underbrush. But not knowing his name (and having a hard enough time getting our beagle to come back to us) we were unable to convince him to come down to the main path.

We got up to the top, and found his person. He was walking the fence line based on where he heard the baying, calling the dog. He also occasionally caught glimpses, but the beagle (though sounding unhappy) was much more interested in exploring the underbrush then coming to the person calling his name.

When we left, at good 45 minutes after we arrived, the beagle was still on the hill, still baying.

Definitely glad that June likes to stick closer to us than that.