"B-E-G-E-L. Beagle." - Charlie Brown

NC, don't think you could get me to give a CRAP vote to any dog breed, and any specific dog it's probably the fault of a human is the dog is CRAP.

My parents always had Beagles. They're super cute, friendly, adorable dogs with huge personalities. Some downsides:

- They are difficult to train. It takes consistency and dedication to train a Beagle, and often many many many repetitions.
- The upside is they're food motivated. The downside is also that they're food motivated - to excess.
- All dogs navigate their world by smell, but Beagles do it to the exclusion of all other senses, including the voice shouting in the distance to come back.
- If let off leash they will follow their nose wherever it leads, usually to no good. Per my first comment, we were never able to train our Beagles to be off-leash.
- The baying can get out of hand. They will bark at anything, everything, and nothing.
- Not particularly social with other dogs. As excited as they are about humans, none of ours cared to socialize with other dogs.

For those reasons, and despite my many fond memories, I've stuck to Lab/German Shepherd (Sheprador?) mixes as an adult. Bigger dogs, for sure, but also dogs that are easy to train (sometimes in as few as 5-6 repetitions), eager to please, loyal to a fault, and can be trusted off-leash, and often shockingly intelligent. As smart as our little Beagles were, they're no match for the intelligence of the Lab/Shepherd mixes I've had.

Still, NC.

Obviously not crap, even to a cat person like me.

Friends have one and she's lovely, but the already-mentioned noise, love of food, and trusting the sense of smell above everything can be a pain. She also likes to hump my leg, which weirds me out. I mean, it's nice to know that I turn her on, but...

The most bizarre thread. NC.

Super cute but way too vocal for me. I'm glad I don't live with one.

I won't call your dog crap.

Everything in this thread is true.

Beans was a great dog, but once he got a smell in his nose he was like a little tank. Unstoppable.

Fences, highways, windowscreens be damned. The horizon beckoned.

All the dogs are Not Crap.

No animals (apart from certain humans) are crap, so even though I strongly support adopt don't buy from breeders policy, this gets a big no crap. Maybe you can adopt purebreds in USA, I don't know. In my country, the dogs that are in animal shelters are in 99.99% cases, mutts.

With that being said, how do hunting dogs like beagles get along with other pets, like cats and birds?
And if you walk them without a leash through the woods, do they go running after every wild animal?

boilermaker wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 12:55 pm With that being said, how do hunting dogs like beagles get along with other pets, like cats and birds?

I have two decades of experience with beagles now (Sprocket is our second beagle) and have had at least two birds as pets at the same time for the entire time. I have failed at training the beagles to do just about anything, but they have never bothered any of my birds. They also never went after any wild birds, either.

boilermaker wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 12:55 pm And if you walk them without a leash through the woods,

Not an option, because

boilermaker wrote: Fri May 19, 2023 12:55 pm do they go running after every wild animal?

Most of them, yes. Particularly anything else with four legs and/or fur.