New Beagle Puppy Adventures – Meet Sugar the Beagle (Part 1)

This is our beautiful little 11-month-old Beagle named Sugar.

We were so lucky to have come across her (and her brother who was already adopted) while out tubing on Sugar Lake at the end of July 2021. We had been looking for quite some time for another dog to add to our family, so she came into our lives at the perfect time.

When we went out on the river that day, it was an amazing time as always. At the end of the day, the place has a bus waiting for you to drive you back to the beginning. This is where the front office is. There were tons of people there hanging around and a bunch of our friends were loving on these two adorable beagle puppies, a boy, and a girl. We were immediately interested. We knew we weren’t able to get the boy because we have a boy dog at home who is very alpha and doesn’t do well with other males. This worked out well because when we went inside to inquire about them, they said that the boy was already adopted but the little girl wasn’t. Her name was Princess.

It didn’t take much for us. We simply looked at each other. I’m not sure who said what, but the conversation went like this:

“Do you want to get her?”

“Yeah”

“Ok”

Seriously, that was our whole conversation. We just knew we found our new baby.

The picture here is our friend holding the boy and my husband holding the little girl Princess. We ended up taking her over to where all our friends were eating lunch and they were all so wonderful in welcoming her to the “family”, and loving on her. It was precious to see. We were talking about whether we wanted to keep the name Princess and then one of our friends Tammi said to name her Sugar, after Sugar Lake that we were just on. Then someone else said that that was a great name. So, our friends all named her Sugar and we couldn’t be happier.

We called her Princess Sugar for the first few days to get her acclimated with her new name.

This was the youngest dog I had ever owned, so it was definitely (and still is) a learning curve on how to care for and deal with a puppy. I wasn’t prepared for the piranha teeth, that’s for sure!

When we first brought her home, we set up the spare room for her to have some space of her own and put a kids gate in the doorway so our other two dogs could smell her and get introduced to her.

We also setup a dog fenced in area in the living room so she could be out there with us while we watched tv, but be in her own space until our other dog Chapo got better around her. He didn’t like her much at first and I think wanted to eat her. So, we kept them separated but still had her there so he could have her around and get used to her.

We would often open up the gate of the fenced-in area so that the other dogs could come in and sniff around. Winnie immediately wanted to go in and check it out. I think she was not liking all the attention the new baby of the family was getting, her being our little baby already.

Here Sugar is saying hello and welcome to her little area…. Winnie just wants to steal all her toys and puppy food. Chapo wouldn’t go in there much… he would often just bark and snip at Sugar.

I actually put Chapo on a leash for the first 24 hours. I kept him close to me and allowed him to let Sugar walk near him and if he snapped I would scold him and pull on his leash. We would do this taking them all outside together as well where he could walk around and he was fairly good with being on the leash allowing me to tag along… but as soon as he snapped at Sugar, he was scolded, told “NO” and I tightened his leash.

I believe this tactic is what really helped him get passed his aggressiveness because after the first 24 hours with Sugar, he was doing just fine and I could let him off. There was only a few times that I saw him getting aggressive or about to be aggressive and I would tell him “NO” and stand between him and Sugar. He immediately understood and learned quite quickly.

Surprisingly, when Chapo was no longer being a jerk towards Sugar, we started having an issue with Winnie being aggressive. We weren’t sure if it was because she saw Chapo doing it or she just did it on her own, but we just incorporated ourselves in between the two girls and told Winnie “NO”, when we saw her being aggressive herself.

Definitely a learning process for us all. The biggest lesson here was actually learning that it was us, the humans, that needed the patience and consistency to teach Sugar, Chapo & Winnie how to behave with each other.

Sugar was loving playtime, getting carrots and following the her new brother and sister everywhere they went. From outside to inside, she couldn’t get enough of them, always wanting to play.

This was not always fun for them, since our household is very low-key and often filled with quiet nap-times. So having a puppy around who was either asleep or full of energy who wanted to play was quite the adjustment for us all.

One thing we really wanted to help in bonding the dogs was making sure we included her closely with other habits we had like scrambled eggs on weekend mornings.

We weren’t sure how she would be with eating because we’ve been very lucky with our other two who generally just graze eat. We can put food out and leave it and they will only eat when they are hungy. We were worried that Sugar would just gobble up all the food that was out…. but surprisingly, Sugar followed suit and was a graze eater as well.

As for the scrambled eggs, she was just like Winnie and had them done in 1.2 seconds.

Another bonding opportunity we had is walk time.

Unfortunately, Sugar didn’t really want to go or like to go on walks. It was quite a struggle to get her to put on the walking collar and when we did get outside, she would just sit down. She didn’t get the hang of what the heck walks were. She much rather run around the backyard all day long.

Then something happened. Her teeth became intensely sharp and she wanted to chew and bite everything…. including us.

This was nothing I had ever experienced before. It was horrible.

I loved her so much but just wanted to push her away at times. We tried everything from shoving toys into her face and mouth when she started biting and nibbling at us to, I hate to say it, but rolling up a newspaper and swatting her face saying “NO” when she did it. That didn’t work like the toys in her face did, thank goodness because I didn’t like swatting her cute adorable face and felt so bad every time I did it.

Thank goodness this stage, as terrible as it was, only lasted a few weeks during her teething phase.

You can see in the below picture just how pointy and sharp the teeth were…. and boy did it hurt when she got ahold of your skin.