Beagle

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"The Beagle Club of NSW (Australia)", BeagleClubnsw.org.au,
   April 2009, web:
   BC-NSW-inf . 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.  


 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.Smith p.209 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.Daglish p.7 These laws were probably written in the Middle Ages for tradition.Rackham p.130 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  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.Jesse (1858) pp.438–9 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:

 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".

 References 

Category:Dog breeds originating in England
Category:FCI breeds