Beagle Recall and the Nose: Living With a Scent Hound

A Beagle has around 220 million scent receptors to your five million, and a brain that gives an enormous share of itself to what the nose reports. Beagles were bred to pick up a hare's line and follow it across country for hours, in a pack, ignoring the huntsman behind them. When your Beagle drops the nose and disappears, they are not disobeying you. The part of the brain that hears you has been switched off by the part that smells rabbit. Understand that, and everything about living with the breed follows.

The recall a Beagle can have

Not a Labrador's. But a good one, in the right places, if you build it like this:

• A fresh word or a whistle, never used for anything else and never used when you can't pay. A whistle carries further and never sounds cross.
• Indoors first. Paired with the best food in the house, twenty times a day for a fortnight. Then the garden.
• A 10 metre long line on a harness in the first field. Never on a collar; a Beagle hitting the end of a line on the neck can damage the throat.
• Pay every recall like it's the first. Chicken, cheese, sprats, or a handful of kibble scattered so the nose gets to work.
• Then release them. 'Go sniff', and back to the trail. This is the lesson Beagles need most. A recall that always ends the fun is one the nose will outbid. A recall that predicts a snack and then more sniffing is one they will choose.
• Recall often when nothing is happening, so the whistle doesn't mean 'the rabbit is about to be taken away'.

Where the line stays on

Anywhere near a road. Anywhere with deer, rabbits, hares or livestock. Any new place for the first several visits. Woodland, where a scent can take a Beagle a mile in three minutes. A long line on a harness is not a failure; it is the seatbelt that lets a Beagle be a Beagle safely. Plenty of excellent Beagle owners never take it off outside a secure field, and their dogs are not the poorer for it. Hire a secure field for the real off-lead running.

Give the nose a job

A Beagle who never gets to use the nose properly finds the bin, the neighbour's cat and the gap in the fence. This is the enrichment the breed was made for:

• Scatter feeding. A meal thrown across the lawn takes ten minutes and works the nose. Free.
• 'Find it'. Treats hidden round a room, then round the house, then in the garden.
• Sniffy walks. The dog sets the pace and the route, on a long line. Worth more than a fast march.
• Scent work classes. Finding a target odour in boxes and rooms. Beagles excel.
• Mantrailing. The Beagle follows a person's scent trail on a long line and finds them. It is the closest thing to what they were built for, and twenty minutes flattens a Beagle more than an hour of walking.

Walking a nose on a lead

A Beagle on a short lead pulls, because the scent is over there and you are not. A front-clip harness helps, and so does giving up on the idea that a walk is a march. Let the dog sniff at their pace on a longer lead for most of the walk, with a short stretch of loose-lead practice near home, paid at your side with kibble. A Beagle who has had ten minutes of proper sniffing walks better for the next twenty. Fighting the nose for the whole walk exhausts you both and teaches nothing.

When they go

Don't chase; a chased Beagle runs faster. Run the other way, calling and cheerful, and they often follow. Carry the best treats always, and when they come back, pay and release; never tell them off, or the next recall is slower. A GPS tracker on the harness is money well spent. And keep the microchip details current, because a Beagle on a scent can be three fields away before you have finished shouting.

The honest summary

You will not train the nose out of a Beagle, and you shouldn't try. You can build a recall the nose sometimes loses to, manage the places where losing matters, and give the instinct enough legal work that it doesn't go looking for its own. The training guide covers the rest of what a hound can learn.