The key to working a new dog in to your pack is to 1) make a controlled introduction, and 2) not over-manage the situation. Let the dogs find their own dynamic. But also 3) be on the lookout for ahole type behavior and correct it. (If you’ve done #1 right, this isn’t usually such a problem.)

Of all our animals, I was most concerned about Ollie shredding Mini Ditka into a billion little puppy pieces. He is ok with other dogs 80% of the time, but the other 20% he’s SUPER aggressive – think Stephen King novel-type stuff. Mini Ditka and Ollie largely ignored each other for the first two weeks.

Then last night I caught this. I think Ollie likes the new guy:

The Lilly family needs another dog like Illinois business needs the Amazon tax. Unfortunately, just like a lot of affiliates in the windy city, that’s exactly what we got last night – at least for now.

I was taking Bennie to the groomer when all of the sudden these two lowlifes in a beat up old pickup truck asked me if I wanted a dog. I asked if they were actually selling dogs out of the back of their pickup (in a Wal-Mart parking lot, no less). After they replied to the affirmative, I gave them a bit of a profanity-laced lecture about what pricks they are and said I’d never buy a dog out of a truck in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

About 5 minutes later, they came back and walked in to the store. I thought for sure I was going to get my ass kicked. Much to my surprise, they asked me to take the dog. Afraid of what might happen to him/her if s/he stayed with these jackoffs, I took him.

The vet pronounced him healthy at the puppy wellness exam and we took him home to meet the rest of the family. We decided to name him Coach Ditka. Here’s a picture. As you can see, in true Ditka fashion he’s already passed out with a bottle of scotch:

I typically can’t stand chihuahuas. I’m determined to make sure that Da Coach is a great animal – that’s why I’m creating the dog project. I’ll be making regular updates of his progress here, including training techniques and behavioral benchmarks, eg “he just learned long division.”

Check back!

Haven’t posted about my furry friends in a while so I thought I’d kick off 2011 with some quick dog training tips. It’s not uncommon for a dog to exhibit behaviors that look (or sound) absolutely adorable but are really dominance behaviors in disguise. If you let them go you may compromise your pack leader position. Here are 5 behaviors to look for and eliminate.

Our newest dog, Ozzy, is a border collie mix. He came in to the house and immediately asserted his dominance over the other dogs. There was some bickering (Bennie wasn’t convinced that he was going to have to give up the top dog spot), but after a few weeks of jostling Ozzy has emerged as our dominant male. Problem is, he has started to exhibit some subtle (or not-so-subtle) dominance behaviors with me and Stephanie. These have started to become  a problem and we are working on re-teaching him who the alpha is. (Namely, not him.) He’s exhibiting 5 behaviors that we are working on eliminating. Note that some of these things look like “oh he’s soooo cuuuuuuute” dog behaviors, but are in fact displays of dominance that need to be corrected.

1. Leading us through doors. Instead of waiting behind us (submissive) when we open a door, he’s lunging ahead.

2. Bumping/moving us. Instead of sitting and waiting to be petted, he tries to physically relocate us by bumping or nuzzling us out of position.

3. Low growls when we a) pet other dogs, b) take his toys away. “He growls but he never bites” is not a good reason to let this behavior continue.

4. Basic obedience regression. Refusing to sit, lay, enter his house when directed.

5. Growling at visitors, even those he knows. Again, “He growls but then gets over it” is not acceptable.

To fix these, I’m working basic obedience. Two 15-20 minute session per day should about do it. We will also start going back to group class at Sin City K9. He is responsive to remote collars so we’ll go with a combination of that and positive reinforcement. We are also going to start bumping him out of our way and ensuring that he doesn’t approach us for petting without being invited. With respect to the low growls and visitor growls, I consider those to be pretty serious violations of puppy etiquette so we’re going to address those quickly and assertively. Guests will also be encouraged to not tolerate that shit.

I find it fascinating how different Ozzy is from our other dogs. We haven’t had any dominance issues with Ernie (bouvier des flandres) or Ollie (shar pei/lab mix) since we got them. Ozzy and Bennie (aussie mix) require constant work and attention. We let it slip a bit this fall, to our discredit. Lesson learned.

Behind every great man is a….lioness?

In a shocking bit o’ local news, one of the trainers at MGM Grand got a little bit up by a male lion last week. The lion looks fairly relaxed until he starts running after one of the trainers…note that the fight was broken up not by the other trainer but by a lioness who was not about to have her day f***ed up by her hubby’s antics. (My wife does the same to me when I’ve had a Dewar’s or two.) Interestingly the male lion only went after one of the trainers, not both of them….check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW_x-2MXrkI

What have I learned from this?

1. The female of the species has a lot of influence over her male counterpart.

2. In times of crisis, cool heads might not always prevail. Sometimes a 4-500 pound cat does.

3. It is unsafe to be in the same glass tank as a large, pissed off lion.

4. You can only train an animal so much. At the end of the day he was still a frickin’ lion.

What are other lessons we can learn? Comment below!

Apparently they think chucking dogs off a bridge is as funny as I do.

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.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to talk to an Associated Press reporter about “people who hate their pets.” The interview talked quite a bit about our history with hard to adopt dogs, how Stephanie and I worked with them, and what some of our “most memorable” stories are. The finished product can be viewed here.