(Yikes!) Savage Beagles Terrorize East End

Charlie Brown, watch your back -- a plague of vicious wild beagles has struck Long Island!

These floppy-eared terrors are no lovable Snoopys -- they're abandoned hunting dogs that live in packs and have gone from humble pets to hounds from hell.

Mattituck resident Dot Faszczewski came face to face with the canine menace two weeks ago, when she was set upon by a group of crazed, hungry beagles as she walked her pet dogs near her parents' Orient Point home.

"They were barking so ferociously that I thought they were going to attack my dogs," she said of the Jan. 16 scare.

Her dogs -- who are much bigger than be agles -- were too scared to even bark back.

"I grabbed the two dogs and ran inside," she said. "I just closed the door when they jumped at the door, and they broke that aluminum portion underneath."

The attack happened in a flash. It was only when the 61-year-old dog lover was safely inside that she made the shocking realization her howling attackers weren't coyotes or Rottweilers, but were three frothing, short-legged, brown-and-white beagles.

"I thought 'Why would they be so ferocious?' The bark that they were barking, like they really wanted to eat me up!" she told The Post.

The angry beagles that attacked Faszczewski are part of a huge community of feral beagles that roams the woods and fields of eastern Long Island after being abandoned by hunters who used them to track down rabbits.

I moved to Yokosuka, Japan when I was eight years old...there were packs of wild dogs living in the tunnels there that the Japanese had burrowed out in WWII, composed of dogs who had gone feral when their owners rotated back to the states and left them behind.

The caves were all supposed to be boarded up, but they weren’t. (I know this, because my older brother and I found several and went exploring in them...nine year olds will do that.) In one, we were pretty far in, and had a handheld spotlight plugged in via a cigarette lighter connecter to a big battery you hung on your shoulder. It was really bright, but I dropped it and it went out. Let me tell you...that was the blackest of the black. I picked the light up and it wouldn’t come on, and I assure you, my heart rate immediately began to increase. Even a dummy like me knew this wasn’t a good thing. No backup light...no matches, no nothing. And we were pretty far into that tunnel through multiple twists and turns. The two of eventually figured out that the cigarette lighter connecter had pulled out of the battery, so we plugged it in and found our way out. But that scared the crap out of both of us, and we never went back in one of those again. (At least I didn’t, but I doubt my brother did, either)

One day, I was riding my younger brother’s bike (a little POS Stingray with a standard coaster brake) through a remote part of the base, mostly composed of vegetation covered lumpy high hills honeycombed with caves. Coming out maybe 100 yards at the most from the hills on both sides was chain link and barbed wire. Inside the chain link fences were military hardware of all kinds. Anchor chains, gun barrels for everything up to 16” guns, shells and bombs piled up, landing craft, weird gray things with wires coming out of them (probably motors or generators) and so on.

So I am pedaling down this deserted road between these vast expanses of chain link fence (it seemed vast to a nine year old) and all of a sudden, a pack of dogs comes running down one of the hills after me. I had never seen a group of dogs like this. It seemed like a hundred dogs, but in retrospect, I don’t think it was more than fifteen or twenty.

But still.

So I began to pedal for all I was worth, standing on the pedals and pushing each pedal with as much force as I could muster. I looked back, and they weren’t gaining on me.

They were nearly on top of me.

At that point...the chain came off the sprockets. It was an annoying problem, and even though we operated constantly on that bike, the chain annoyingly continued to come off when you really put the pedals to the metal. I don’t think “annyoing” was the word that appeared in my head when that chain came off.

And then the dogs were all around me, snapping at my legs. I hoisted my legs up on the handlebars, and the dogs began leaping and snapping at me. To make matters worse, I was rapidly losing speed, and the bike began to meander from side to side. Probably another five seconds, and I was going to run out of forward speed, and the momentum that would keep me upright.

Out of the blue, and with no precognition, I suddenly veered to one of those chain link fences and grabbed onto it as I came up next to it. The bike kept going as I scrambled to dig my toes in and climb, which I did before the dogs figured out what I was doing. I climbed as fast as I could to the top of the barbed wire and swung one leg over.

To this day, I am not sure why I didn’t just climb down the other side and stand there, but I think that perhaps I thought I would really be breaking regulations if I was found standing inside the barbed wire fence by the Shore Patrol. So, I swung my legs under the bottom strand of the barbed wire, and rested my armpits on the top strand.

The dogs leaped, barked and milled around for an eternity, but I think it must have been only about 15 minutes. Eventually, they figured I wasn’t coming down, and all ran off and disappeared into the hill. I waited another half hour or so, then came down. I put that chain back on the sprocket pretty quick, but I think it took twice as long because I only spent a quarter of the time actually doing it, and the rest of the time looking all around me expecting them to run back down and have at me.

A year or so before that when I was back in the states, a friend of mine and I used to taunt another friend’s dog (a BIG Wiemaraner) by running through his back yard and leaping over the fence on the other side of the yard. The two of us would go to opposite sides of the yard, and whichever one of us was left alone, we had to jump and run. Invariably, the dog would see what was going on, and run at top speed after the one running through the yard, just missing our legs as we clambered up the fence and disappeared over the side. He would then see our faces appear to look back over at him, and he would leap snapping at us. Our hearts were pounding, and we would laugh, then climb back up on the fence and tightrope walk the length of the fence with our arms extended in both directions. The dog would leap and snap at us, and when we lost our balance, we always made sure to bail out to the OUTSIDE of the fence. Occasionally, if our other friend was home, he would open the bathroom window and encourage us to run over and jump in the open window. That was really challenging because you had to time it and leap for the window, while you could just hit the fence and climb.

On one of these bathroom jumping sessions, the dog caught me. I didn’t time the leap right, and was trying to use my sneaker to get a purchase on the side of the house, and he grabbed my pants around the ankle and dragged me into the yard. He shredded my pants and ripped my sneaker off, which I had to go back in the yard to reclaim. I had several wounds from his teeth, but they were furrows, not puncture wounds. When he grabbed my pants leg and began to shake and snarl, I remember looking into those green eyes below the gray head with the bump on it. And that dog looked seriously like a wild animal. His green eyes looked fierce and crazy, and that scared the beejesus out of me. I think my other friend jumped in the yard and the dog ran after him, so I was able to jump in the window. I wasn’t really hurt, just scratched up.

But when those dogs came running out of the jungle after me, there was something completely frightening about a whole group of them. When that Weimaraner grabbed me, I remember laughing hysterically while the kid who owned the dog was trying to help me in the window. When that pack ran after me, I was scared shitless.

They sound more like foxhounds than beagles.

I'm the proud and happy owner of a 2-3 year old Beagle. She was a stray, picked up by local rescue league that figured she'd be a good match for my family and placed her with us.

She's a great dog, phenomenal and gental personality, loves to be with us and gets VERY upset when we're not around (Beagles are bred specifically to be pack animals, more-so than canines in general). But to say that she's "brazen" around food is something of an understatement. She learned pretty quickly how to pop open the door to the cabinet where we keep the garbage can ... and has no hesitation, despite multiple scoldings, in trying to get in there even when we are in the room.

She's very observant of us humans - watches us, knows our weaknesses and when we aren't exactly paying attention. A few months back she boosted a hotdog clean out of my 5-year-old's hands as he sat on our couch watching a TV show. She sat and waited and watched (with me watching her the whole time, fascinated by what I was seeing) until the moment he turned to pick up his cup and then ... SNAP! She darted in, scarfed the hotdog and took off across the room. Kid was completely shocked, just sat there saying "Where's my hot dog?"

She ended up under a table, and fought me pretty hard when I pulled her out (and the hotdog out of her mouth) ... and showed absolutely NO evidence of the "hangdog" remorse look when I scolded her.

This story about feral Beagles is amusing (since I don't live there), but not really surprising.

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