A few days ago, Gary woke me up at four thirty in the morning.
“Ellen! Ellen!”
“Whaarmfmumu ... ?”
“Ellen! There’s something dying in our backyard.”
“Whuh?”
“I think one of the raccoons is wounded in the backyard and it’s dying. It’s making awful sounds right outside the window.”
We went together to the back door where I heard the doleful, anguished, desperate, unmistakeable cries of a ...
”Beagle. That’s a beagle, Gary.”
I convinced him after a few minutes of “Really, that’s what beagles sound like, there’s a beagle across the street, I thought they were torturing him when I first heard him,” and so on, he settled down.
I may be painting all beagles with too wide a brush, though, because I thought all beagles made the same god-awful sound the neighbor's beagle does. I was surprised when I had to hunt on the internet to find video of a beagle that makes the same noise I hear every morning and that Gary heard that night. The neighbor’s beagle sounds like the one here. You have to wait nineteen seconds: it takes a little coaxing to make the same distinctive sound the neighbor's dog does.
Sadly, neighbor beagle does not require any coaxing. It really sounds like a dying animal.
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