You Can't Spoil a Beagle

About the Book

“All Queens Are Not Born Royal”

Most beagle owners I know can tell you anything you want to know about their beagles’ ability to trail a rabbit, and minding their commands in the field, but other than that, they really don’t know much about them.  They punish them for losing a trail, for stopping the hunt to check in with their masters, and most don’t think you should pet and pamper a beagle if you want a good hunter.  That had not been my  experience.

Surely, my beagle , Sally, was different from most hounds  if all those truisms about training are correct.  I was told I would never know what a good dog was until I had owned  a thoroughbred  beagle with all the exact markings, and properly trained by the finest handlers. For some reason or other, all those admonitions didn’t quite fit Sally. But then, as I said, Sally was different from most hounds.

Why Sally acted as she did, I don’t know.  Some say she was spoiled by my constant attention and lack of discipline when she broke from the hottest trail, or chased the neighbor’s cat  or dragged my wife’s slippers into the living room to chew on.  I was told so many times that she manipulated me instead of my doing the training, as was supposed to happen, if  you can believe the dog- training manuals.

Surely she was different from most hounds, just as kids grow up differently from the neighbors’ kids whose parents have different ideas about how to raise a child.  I was told I would never know what a “good dog”  was until I had owned and  hunted with a registered , blooded beagle and I suspect that  my friends were correct.  However, those who said that will never know what affection for a dog is, what true companionship is, what friendship  and love and thrills are until they have known a hound like Sally.

Sally didn’t need any papers to prove to me she was a thoroughbred.  So far as I was concerned, judging a dog by her papers is like judging a man by his family tree; it doesn’t mean much. When hunters asked me why I put up with a hunting  dog that refused to hold a hot trail just to get a pat on the head, I just told them that was the way she was, and I wouldn’t change her for the world.

I can still hear the chuckle in my dad’s voice when he recalled the time we got Sally from a sweet old lady  in Star City, West Virginia, about two miles from my home.  “If someone had told me then,” Dad said, “that someday  I would be proud of that dog, I would have told him it couldn’t possibly happen.”  But, Sally had a way of growing on you, and ,  hard as it was for him to admit it at first,  Dad loved that hound almost as much as I did.

Certainly, Sally had not begun her life with him in his good graces.  Althought the years were to prove her a  queen in her own right, and my dad learned to love her like you wouldn’t believe, he would have wagered the house and all he owned  that  she wouldn’t live to see here first summer.  The fact was, he thought every part of Sally was a big mistake.  Sally was the runt of her litter, and my older brother, Bill, and I  brought her at the cheapest possible rate: two  dollars, when the going price was twenty five   dollars.  Her tummy was a little bulgy, the hair was off the tip of her tail, and when we got home, we weren’t sure what it was we had bought.

During her erractic, but colorful life, my loving beagle was to amaze me a thousand times and was always full of surprises.  For instance, Sally was always a  one-man dog when hunting.  She refused to run with a pack.  Once in a while a friend of mine brought his beagle along, and we hunted together, but actually , it was his dog  with him and Sally with me.

Knowing this about my beagle, I wondered what her reaction was going  to be as we ambled upon a pack of other beagles hunting the same brushfield.  Sally  was as Sally would be; she ignored the whole lot of them just as if they were not there.  She didn’tlook up as the hounds went by sniffing  the trail, but being

About the Author

Bob Bowers grew up in the mountains of West Virginia, where he hiked, camped, fished and hunted all his life, except for time spent in the Army, West Virginia University and the University of Michigan, where he extended the natural love for the outdoors by getting an in-depth education on the subject. During most of this time, his constant companion was his beagle, Sally, only there were really two Sallys. When the first Sally began to age, she had to be put away due to severe cancer. As quickly as possible, Bob and his wife bought another baby beagle, and she was also named Sally. It was the years spent hunting with these beagles, enjoying their company, being fascinated by their antics, that brought about this book, and most will agree, “You can’t spoil a beagle--well, not much.”