Interesting Facts
- Beagles are one of the most affectionate and loyal of all dogs
- Very curious dogs and they follow their nose, literally!
- Hunting with beagles in Newfoundland is an old tradition
- Beagles do not drool
- Beagles spayed or neutered will gain weight quickly so be mindful about food and exercises
- The colour that a beagle is born with is rarely the colour that will stay with him/her. Their colouring can change in the first year or two of life.
- In England, beagles were used for hunting rabbits, quail, hares, pheasant and other small animals.
- Beagles always have white feet and on the tip of their tail. (so they could be followed by their masters on horseback during the “chase”)
- While the current Queen Elizabeth is know for her fondness of Corgis, Queen Elizabeth I was a beagle fan. Some portraits of her even included her dogs. King James I called her “his dear little beagle”.
- President Lyndon B. Johnson had two beagles in the White House named Him and Her that he would famously (or infamously) hold up by the ears
- A “Beagle Brigade” was employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1980s to sniff out airport luggage that contained food that could have pests that might be dangerous to crops. Their noses contain about 220 million smell receptors; humans have about 5 million
- Beagles were bred so their coats would repel water and not attract burrs or other plants while hunting. As a result, they are easy to groom and they don’t have a “dog smell”
- Beagles are well represented in our culture. Snoopy, from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip, is probably the best-known ambassador of the breed, but Odie, Garfield’s pal/nemesis in Jim Davis’s strip is also a beagle. Charles Darwin’s ship on his five-year nature voyage was called the HMS Beagle, an appropriate name for a seeking expedition. The beagle even appears in some of Shakespeare’s works, including Twelfth Night.