I give this beagle a 10 for creative problem solving.

Our Gracie was a counter-surfer when she first came to live with us so snacks, the butter dish, balls of yarn all needed to be kept off the kitchen table when unattended. Since the only dogs we had previously lived with were Freya (100 pounds) and Robby (70 pounds) who couldn’t have gotten onto a counter if they’d wanted to, nothing really prepared me for what this Formosan Mountain cat-dog could get into. The only difference between her and the beagle in the video is that she is so athletic that she didn’t need a chair.

One day I left the two dogs upstairs with their dog door open into their dog yard while I was downstairs in my studio with a client and the communicating door was closed. When I was finished for the day and came upstairs Gracie was all excited and was trying to herd me outside like Lassie. I walked out onto the porch and she leaped off to run a gleeful Victory lap around a cairn of avocados and other fruits she had stolen from the garden window over the sink and carried outside to stack into a pile. As I brought them all back inside I saw that each had a distinctive fang pattern pierced into it.