Yeah… Adorable!
I would agree that you only think you are the alpha, not a real alpha. I suspect that you took a training course with your previous dog (as evidenced by your positive/negative reinforcement thinking, which, by the way doesn’t work with humans either) and are confusing it with dog psychology (what Caesar Milan does.)
All of the behavior you are describing is because the dog is trying to be the leader.
I have also heard how hard beagles are to train, but an army of airport drug sniffing beagles tends to disagree.
All those “he’s a beagle,” comments are true. My beagle does his own thing too.
Not sure if I should end this post with a 
or a 
I think the “list of smart and dumb breeds” that’s floating around the net is really more a “list of breeds that are more or less obedient and paying attention to humans” than a true intelligence scale. A lot of independent hunting and guarding breeds which originally worked all day with little human supervision scored poorly on it.
Decades ago I had a beagle who learned that if she faced into the corner where the metal shelving unit was bare, her bark would be amplified. She’d stand there and bark once into this big reverb chamber, then swing he head around, look at us, and grin.
I have my 5th and 6th beagle right now. Quincy who died about a year ago was the smartest dog I ever saw. Winston my latest is a dumb dog. Good thing he has that cute thing working for him. It took almost a year to house break him. Quincy understood in 2 days and never made a mistake.
My neighbors have no trouble with the dogs barking at night. One neighbor says it is like having a watch dog he does not have to feed.
We have a pretty hard headed lab/border collie mix, and we had a lot of success with “The Dog Listener” by Jan Fennell.
I’m going to have to check that out. My beagle mix isn’t dumb, he’s just, ummm, opinionated. He knows he’s not supposed to bark but enjoys it too much to stop. He learned sit and down almost immediately (both verbally and with hand signals) but if he doesn’t want to sit, no amount of telling is going to get him to. And lately he’s taken to moving to my spot of the bed whenever I get up briefly to go to the bathroom. I’ll come back and he’s curled up in the warm spot even though he knows I’m going to make him move back to his spot on the bed.
Reminds me of the Far Side cartoon translating what dogs are saying when they bark: “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey ! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!”
I love the “Blah blah Ginger” one too.
Yep!
I harming your dog.
On the voles and rabbits: They can harbor disease and parasites. Our dogs have managed to pick up ticks, fleas, and tapeworms from rabbits. Clancy the lab once brought me a jackrabbit he caught where the fleas were coming off like smoke from a firebrand…shudder! The ticks were the hardest to beat though…took months and spraying the whole house.
Leave mousetraps on the couch.