The video is short and hard to watch: a beagle in a work vest, doing exactly what he was trained to do, gets kicked so hard he leaves the ground. What makes the story worth telling is not the cruelty, which the courts handled fast. It is how quickly Freddie shook it off, and what his job reveals about a breed most people think of as a couch hound.
What happened at Dulles
On June 26, 2025, Freddie, a five-year-old beagle with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, alerted his handler to a suitcase during a routine baggage check at Washington Dulles International Airport. The bag belonged to a traveler arriving from Cairo. When the handler began asking about its contents, the traveler kicked Freddie hard enough, per the affidavit, to lift the roughly 25-pound dog off the floor.
A vet found Freddie had contusions along his right rib area. Nothing broken, but a real injury. Meanwhile, agents searched the luggage his nose had flagged and turned up more than 100 pounds of undeclared food, including about 55 pounds of beef, 44 pounds of rice, eggplant, cucumbers, bell peppers, corn seeds, and herbs.
The man, 70-year-old Hamed Ramadan Bayoumy Aly Marie, pleaded guilty to harming an animal used in law enforcement. He was credited with time served, ordered to cover Freddie’s veterinary bill, and deported to Egypt the following day.
Why a beagle, of all dogs
There is a reason CBP’s agriculture teams, nicknamed the Beagle Brigade, lean on this specific breed rather than something more imposing. Beagles are scent hounds, bred over centuries to lock onto an odor and follow it with almost comic single-mindedness. They are small enough not to intimidate travelers in a crowded arrivals hall, food-motivated enough to work all day for treats, and gifted with one of the most sensitive noses in the dog world.
That nose is doing serious work. Undeclared meat and produce can carry pests and diseases that would be catastrophic if they slipped across a border and into the food supply. A single beagle stationed at a baggage carousel is a cheap, mobile, tireless early-warning system, and Freddie has been a productive one, sniffing out thousands of pounds of prohibited plant and animal products during his time on the job.
The part that says the most about him
Here is the detail that reframes the whole incident. Freddie was originally a rescue before he was trained for detection work, and by his handler’s account he does not experience the job as work at all. He treats the search like an endless game of hide-and-seek, one where finding the hidden thing gets him paid in treats. The kick, by the same account, rattled him more than it hurt him.
After a stretch of rest, he made a full recovery and returned to duty within weeks, tail up, nose down, back to the game.
The bigger point
It is easy to read a story like this as just another clip of a person behaving horribly, and the assault was real. But the more durable takeaway is about the dogs themselves: working detection animals are not props. They are trained partners doing a job that protects millions of people, usually while having what looks, from the outside, like the time of their lives.
Freddie is fine. The food is confiscated. And somewhere at Dulles right now, a small hound with an enormous nose is sniffing a suitcase and thinking he is winning a game.
