Monday 8am:

It was the Greek Orthodox Easter on Sunday so we had about 20 family members over to celebrate that as well as Chris’ 30th Birthday. After the window breaking incident was fixed it was business as usual with the eating and drinking.

Someone kindly gathered up the two garbage bags of rubbish and placed them outside the gate, near the big  household waste bins, out of the reach of the two dogs.

So imagine my surprise when i woke up on Monday morning to see a random meat tray sitting in the middle of the back yard. I was staring at it, wondering if I’d carelessly left it on the BBQ’s side table when i see the Beagle trot into view holding a glass bottle out the side of her mouth like an over sized cigar…
The sense of dread (or as i like to call it, my Sixth Sense) fills me. Should i open the back door and investigate? This option usually involves heavy cleaning of some sort, rubber gloves to deal with broken stuff and many garbage bags to wrap the bodies in… ahem! i meant WASTE…

Or should i just turn a blind eye and not venture out of the house for the whole day.

Curiosity got the better of me so i opened the back door and looked around the corner to find…

Yep - just as i suspected. Two big bags of garbage shredded and filth strewn everywhere.

I surveyed the damage then walked backwards slowly into the house and quietly shut the door.

"KIDS! We’re going out!"

Later in the afternoon, when the kids were napping i donned my cleaning outfit
and tended to the mess. Thankfully my garbage guts dogs had licked every surface clean of cake icing, meat juices, salad dressing, stuck on rice etc. so i just had to pick up 3,567 pieces of shredded plastic and other assorted rubbish.

What puzzled me the most was, how did they manage to pull two huge bags of garbage through the gate? If you go back to that gate picture, you’ll see that there is a wooden grid across the viewing gap, the squares are at most 10cm squared- impossible to pull big bags through.

I envisioned Jolie standing on Buster then scrambling up the grid like a ladder, grabbing the bag and hauling it over the fence. Some kind of bizarre circus freak act of desperation to get their paws on meat grease and icing…

I imagined some ingrate neighbour or passing kid, lobbing the bags over the fence just to watch the dogs to bezerk tearing the bags creating a Trash Tornado…

But the real answer was revealed to me 10 minutes later.

I was on the other side of the fence (in the front yard) picking up the rubbish that had fallen out before the bags got dragged through the fence. Apparently an 18m old Beagle can fit her whole head and neck through a 10cm squared hole!! She shoved her head through and was dragging an icing caked bowl through the hole!!

So I think she must have stuck her head through the gaps, torn bits of plastic off the garbage bags sides and dragged each individual piece of garbage through the hole for further inspection and shredding.

This was no small feat considering the 3,567 pieces of rubbish i’d picked up. She must have been up all night dragging garbage through the holes one by one…

Determination and Persistence… two traits that are strong in both my species of kids, fur and human!