Beagle

For the ship that Charles Darwin sailed on, see HMS Beagle.

Beagle
Tricolour Beagle
Other names	English Beagle
Origin	England
Traits Height 13–16 in (33–41 cm) Weight Males 22–25 lb (10.0–11.3 kg) Females 20–23 lb (9.1–10.4 kg) Coat Short haired, hard coat of medium length Colour Tricolour or white in combination with black & tan/brown or brown/tan or yellow/white
Kennel club standards The Kennel Club standard FCI standard
Dog (domestic dog)

The Beagle is a breed of small- to medium-sized dog. It is a hound, with short legs and long, soft ears. Because of their excellent smell and quick instincts, beagles are often used for hunting hare, rabbit, and other kinds of game.

Beagles are also popular as pets because of their good size, sweet temperament, and usual good health.

Although beagle-type dogs have existed for over 2,000 years, the modern kind came from Great Britain around the 1830s.

Because of their character, beagles are often used for animal testing.

Appearance

Beagles can have coats of different colours. They are widely known for sporting the three-coloured look (black, brown, and white). They usually have brown eyes.

Sense of smell

Beagles have a very strong sense of smell. They have around 225 million scent receptors. That makes their sense of smell at least 10,000 times stronger than humans'.

A 2019 research found that beagles could detect lung cancer with 97% accuracy.

Early beagles

Ancient Greece

Dogs that look almost the same as the modern Beagle existed in Ancient Greece around the 5th century BC. In the Treatise on Hunting or Cynegeticus, Xenophon wrote about a hound that hunted hares by scent and was followed by foot.

The Southern Hound is thought to be an ancestor of the Beagle

Medieval era

In the 11th century, William the Conqueror brought the Talbot hound to Britain. The Talbot was a white, slow hound. At one point, English Talbots were crossed with Greyhounds to make them faster in running. They went extinct, but only after they had made the Southern Hound more popular. This helped the Southern Hound descend to the Beagle.

From medieval times, beagle was used as a general description for small hounds, even though they are actually very different from the modern breed. Small breeds of beagle-type dogs were living even from the times of Edward II and Henry VII. Edward and Henry both had packs of Glove Beagles, who were named because of their small size.

Small hounds were mentioned in the Forest Laws. These laws were probably written in the Middle Ages for tradition. However, if they were real, they would prove that beagle-type dogs lived in England before 1016.

Pocket beagles

Queen Elizabeth I kept a breed known as a Pocket Beagle, which stood 8 to 9 inches (20 to 23 centimetres) at the shoulder. It could fit in a "pocket" or saddlebag and ride along on a hunt.

Elizabeth I called the dogs her singing beagles and often entertained guests at her royal table by letting her Pocket Beagles play amid their plates and cups. It's possible that since then, the word "beagle" has been used to describe the same type of small hounds.

In an 1866 book by George Jesse called Researches into the History of the British Dog, Gervase Markham describes the Beagle as small enough to sit on a man's hand:

[a] little small mitten-beagle, which may be companion for a ladies kirtle, and in the field will run as cunningly as any hound whatere (anywhere), only their musick (music) is very small like reeds.

In popular culture

Beagles have been included in popular culture, literature, and art since Queen Elizabeth began to rule. More recently, beagles have appeared in movies, television shows, and comic books. Snoopy, a character in the comic strip Peanuts, has been called "the world's most famous beagle".