Turns out that my interview snippet from the Associated Press has gotten around the block quite a bit. Stephanie’s aunt called us from Maryland yesterday wondering if it was the same Joe Lilly in Las Vegas that she saw on MSNBC.
Although this is pretty cool, I want to clarify my “throw him off a bridge” comment, lest my animal-loving friends over at the Nevada SPCA think twice about letting the Lilly family adopt another animal. 
Southern Nevada has two big rescue operations. Dewey, aka Nevada SPCA, is a no-kill shelter. Leid is the city pound. It’s a kill shelter and puts down TONS of dogs every year.
Stephanie and I consider it our mission in life to rescue dogs that are deemed otherwise unadoptable. Our first experience with this was Ollie, and that went so well that we figured we could do it again. We adopted Ollie as a playmate to Ernie and planned it out for weeks in advance.
By contrast, Bennie came into our lives somewhat by impulse. Although he’s a one of our furry kids now, the first year or so was rough. Really rough. “Throwing him off a bridge” rough….
The next few posts are the story of Bennie’s rehabilitation and integration into our pack.
Part 1 – Rescuing Bennie
We first saw Bennie at a Leid satellite office – they opened this office up for a while after hitting occupancy at their main facility. Leid, unlike SPCA, is a kill shelter. Bennie was turned in to Leid after being hit by a car and rehabbed by a kind stranger.
Bennie was an “impulse adoption” – we dropped by the facility while shopping for shoes and fell in love with him. He’s a really beautiful animal. Part border collie, part smooth collie or sheltie, and the most expressive eyes you’ve ever seen.
We tried to take him home that first day and the kennel operator said no. She was genuinely trying to discourage the rescue….we thought she was playing hard to get. Little did we know…
She told us he was dog aggressive, totally unsocialized, neurotic, untrained, and insanely car aggressive. She was right. We tested the last one by taking him out back to an empty lot. Whenever a car passed by he’d go tight to the end of the leash, start barking maniacally, bite the air, foam at the mouth, blow tons of coat, and express his anal glands – and the cars passing were a couple hundred feet away on the other side of a huge empty lot.
Our kind of dog.
Instead of saying “hey do you have any old lab mixes?” this made us want Bennie more. Ollie had been diagnosed as “unadoptable” by the folks at Nevada SPCA and we had no problems socializing him to our fledgling pack. We figured we could do it again with Bennie. That was a really stupid thing to figure.
Stephanie sold this lady on our dog training credentials and Bennie was ours. The day she let us have him, she told us he just stopped running in circles and pissing on himself this morning. That was apparently a good day for him. With that we paid the $75 adoption fee and ran next door to PetCo to get a crate for the drive home.
While trying to put Bennie (at that time his name was “Scooter”) in the crate, he bit my hand and arm a number of times and clawed me so badly that I had a 9″ scar on my right forearm for over a year. Good stuff.
The ride home consisted of more barking, foaming, growling, crate-attacking, and anal gland expressing.
I learned several things about Bennie as a result of that trip:
1. His bark is at least 3x louder than other dogs of comparable size. He accomplishes this by forcing his soul out of his throat whenever he speaks. He regains his soul by eating things other than dog food. Apparently raw yams, purses, bananas, jalapenos, plastic, cat fur, and cardboard all contain remnant dog soul. Who knew?
2. He has dramatic stink retention in his anal glands and can deploy at will. (Never got the smell out of that car.)
3. He really really hates cars.
Next Up: Setting the pack order, failed training.