"4,000 beagles will be rescued from a Virginia breeding facility" / CNN / 12 Jul 22

[verysad]

@djung This just popped up on my Youtube feed:

To be clear I have no affiliation with the Beagle Freedom Project (I've donated in the past, though) and am unaware of the apparent wrangling and drama going on behind the scenes. If this is true, though, it's not a good look for the organizations who are now playing power games with these dogs.

 

[janieve]

@ginaxmill Beagles are kind of great. (I'm biased, and that doesn't contribute substantively to the discussion, but I stand by my statement.)

 

[helpthiscompany]

@janieve Beagles are amazing little dog hobbits. They look like full size dogs but they are smaller in size. They have a deep love for food, comfort, companionship, and song (well what they call singing). They are stubborn and funny and goofy, and are always up for a great big adventure. Their hearts are full of love and just want someone to share it with.

And they do have hairy feet.

 

[ginaxmill]

@janieve Well, it is sort of relevant, though. Thinking about how these dogs obviously weren't "socialized" to be pets, I was also thinking about how the many beagles I knew growing up were some of the least neurotic dogs I've ever known. A pain in the ass? Sure. But sunny. Hope this beagle crew is similarly unflappable and that that helps them to live happily ever after.

 

[janieve]

@ginaxmill Yep. I grew up with my parents doing a fair amount of fostering (and adopting) for a beagle rescue (with my sister and me doing a fair amount of daily care and basic training). More of ours came from failed hunting situations, but still, never bred or raised to be household pets. Not every home is a dog home, and not every dog home is a beagle home, but looking back (I'm thinking about the time I was 16-21ish and had been doing this for a few years, not earlier), I do feel like most of the instructions we gave adopters were straightforward ones of beagle management:

1. If it's not inside or fenced, it needs to be on a leash/long line/etc.
2. You need to baby gate the dog out of the kitchen, and your garbage needs a latching lid.

And, like... that's the entirety of the special beagle rules.

 

[muslim1234]

@janieve We have a unicorn beagle who's gone into the trash maybe twice in 3 years! He also misses crumbs on the floor all the time though, so maybe he just doesn't have much of a beagle nose...

 

[janieve]

@muslim1234 We had the one for whom we had to barricade in front of the fridge and "lock" the pantry door with a bungee in addition to baby gating the kitchen. So it's a spectrum. (We didn't adopt that one out, though. We kept her.)