Beagles Are The Best

Choosing a pet for your child/children can be a daunting task. When the animals are babies, you would probably want to adopt both a cat and a dog. If your child is a boy, you should definitely pick a dog. If you have a daughter, she would probably prefer a kitten. Speaking as a father with a son, we chose a dog.

What kind of a dog should one get? It's an unending question with no clear answer, so you need to decide whether you want an active dog, a show dog, or a cuddly little pet. Being an active and athletic family, we chose a pure bred beagle and named her Chipper...

A beagle is a hound dog, with a very keen sense of smell and a primary instinct for hunting. If she should get a scent of a rabbit (as on a golf course), she will take off like a bat out of hell, and it could take you hours to finally track her down to put a leash on her.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Firstly, beagles are very easy to house train. It took us less than a week to get her to go outside to do her business. Beagles are very hungry dogs, always wanting to eat.

This has its advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage is that it makes it very easy to train and teach them tricks. All you need is a couple of cookies and keep repeating the thing you want her to learn or do. Did I mention that beagles are very intelligent dogs? Chipper learned to do at least twelve tricks in no time and understood many of our spoken words.

The big disadvantage is that because of their greed, you have to make sure you ration her food intake or they tend to get very fat and heavy. Just restrict her food intake to one meal per day and snacks when learning new tricks.

Her hunting and tracking instinct meant that she will continue to try to get out of the yard. We installed a wire fence behind the lilac bushes around our back yard. Early in her life when she was just a wee pup, we kept losing her and having to scour the neighborhood to find her. We finally discovered that she had dug a hole under the wire fence behind the lilac bushes that we could not readily detect.

To make sure we were able to retrieve her if she got lost, we had a silver tag made that said, "My name is Chipper. I am lost. Please call xxx". It is also wise to stock up on several boxes of chocolate as a reward to the neighbor who would phone us after finding her roaming the streets.