To me, a beagle is tri-colored and has the white bit on the rump that almost resembles an airplane. I do have a faint recollection of a liver colored beagle when I was very young; I think he was my Dad’s hunting dog. His name was Puppy (ok, so my parents named me after my mother and my grandmother, so maybe they weren’t really inventive when it came to names).

The next beagle I named Happy. We got Happy as a tiny pup from the dump, yes, you did read that right, the dump. Someone told my Dad when I was about 6 years old that someone had left a mother and pups at the dump. That was back in the olden days when you really dumped everything in the dump and then they burned all the trash. It was not a good place for dogs and so off we went and I picked Happy, a beagle puppy with an airplane on his butt.

Turns out Happy was also part German Shepard so he grew VERY big and had a bushy tail, but he looked like a beagle. He was a good friend.

People have been throwing away dogs for a long time and I learned at a young age that dogs shouldn’t be abandoned and I should adopt the ones I could.

Mimi, who my Dad said might have been purebred beagle but her ears were too short, showed up at my doorstep when I was 12. Since I lived in a very small town, I later found out that a family left her off on a mountaintop because they didn’t want her. She was trying to get home, instead she found me (a neighbor called the pound so we had to go and adopt her which made her legally ours). She was probably being a beagle and some people just don’t understand the breed.

Oh, and she had an airplane on her butt.

When my son and I decided that we needed a doggie in 2003, I found BREW. We found Pippin. She’s a typical beagle, there is no longer toilet paper on the wall hooks in the bathrooms because she will take the roll and run around the house. She was a drop off at the local pounds by her owners, I bet she was also just being a beagle.

My vet says Pippin’s purebred, although her ears are short (my Dad said the ears should be pulled forward and the ends should touch around the nose if the beagle is purebred, but I learned that in the 70s they bred beagles to have shorter ears) and (did you guess?) she has an airplane on her butt.

People who see the pictures of Mimi think the doggie is Pippin, even if they don’t see the airplane on the butt. I guess that’s history repeating itself.

I love her so much and now we also have BREW fosters in our home. So far they’ve all been “blanket beagles” with a totally black back and butt, but Pippin’s got the airplane on her butt, so I feel the connection.

There was a non-beagle who became the love of my life. As a teenager I worked in the local vet’s facility, which (remember – I grew up in a small town) was also the city pound. Patches was a sheepdog and something mix; black and white and just lovely. I found a lot of animals homes when I worked at the pound, but I couldn’t find one for Patches. The day I arrived and he was gone, I cried.

Why do people throw these doggies away? I will never understand. Thanks so much BREW for giving these lovely pups a second chance.

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