[Ernie is my 5 year old bouvier des flandres. As a special surprise for my birthday, he has agreed to take some blogging burden off of my shoulders and answer some reader questions. -Joe]
Hi everyone! I’d like Joe to have a fun birthday weekend, put the laptop down and play catch with me for a bit, so I’ve hijacked his MBP and will be answering reader questions this weekend. So if there’s anything you want to know about me, Joe, Las Vegas, guitar, or internet marketing, go ahead and send me some questions! I look forward to hearing from you! – Ernie.
Other Random Stuff
Apparently they think chucking dogs off a bridge is as funny as I do.
Other Random Stuff
My last post took us through the first couple of weeks worth of having Bennie in our lives. This final post contains the big secret that I learned about Bennie, which is that he was 110% obedience trained when I rescued him. How do I know that, you ask? Simple. We put a Dogtra on him, dialed it WAAAY down and started giving commands. He had basic obedience down inside of 15 minutes.
Of course, getting him to comply was the trick.
After a couple of months of regular collar training sessions, we learned that Bennie isn’t really responsive to the collar. (Ernie and Ollie, on the other hand, respond awesome to the collar.)
Bennie is crazy for food. To get him to internalize the training and get it to (sorta) stick we went the treat training route. It works pretty well to this day, although he’s still very much a wild child.
Other fun Bennie stories:
- During a dog rescue event he lifted his leg and urinated all over me – intentionally. We were outside standing halfway between a fire hydrant and a tree at the time, so I know using me as a target was not for lack of other options.
- When we (foolishly) let them have the run of the house, the dogs once threw a frat party, knocking over a pomegranate vodka infusion I was making, drinking 100% of it and treating my house like the dumpster out back behind a slummy Chinese restaurant.
- 3 raw yams. 1 sitting. No kidding.
Other Random Stuff
Before we got Bennie to the house we decided it’d be a good idea to take him to The Soggy Dog, our neighborhood “do it yourself” dog wash. After all, he smelled like months of his own urine and very fresh ass juice from the anal gland expression.
We got him really wet and started washing. About 1/3 of the way through the wash he started to get angry enough that I was worried about another attack, so we did a half-assed rinse and partially towel dried him. I tried to trim his toenails and was greeted by another bite to the hand. This is starting well.
Our new dog now reeked of ass juice, piss-covered wet fur, and lavender….just like the Four Queens.To his credit, he managed to make it back to his crate without mauling me again. Small victories, I guess.
We got him home, put the other boys in the back yard, let him in and showed him the house. Rich from Sin City K-9 (world’s best dog trainer) suggested we tether him to us for the first week or so to evaluate his potty training. Stephanie took the first shift and it went well. He followed her around the house, got familiar with the scents, and sat next to her while we watched a movie. He even allowed her to brush out some knots and use the Furminator for a good hour or two!
After the movie we though it time to make intros to the rest of the pack. Fortunately we got this right. If you aren’t familiar, the wrong way to introduce two dogs (particularly if you are unsure of their level of dog aggression) is to let them off leash and do their own thing. This can lead to fights.
At Rich’s suggestion, we put Ernie (our bouvier) and Bennie on leashes and walked around the house with them. I had Bennie and Stephanie had Ernie. We didn’t allow them to look at each other or interact – we just walked, let them share space and get used to each other.
After 15 minutes with no low growls or back fur on end, we decided to sidle up to one another. Stephanie put Ernie on a sit-stay and I walked up next to Ernie, facing the same direction….so we were dog/handler/dog/handler.
That went well and Bennie was not showing any signs of aggression so we did a head-on walk by. That went well so we allowed Bennie to sniff Ernie while he was on a down-stay. No problems there! We allowed them to do a less structured intro and kinda do their dog thang. Again, no problems. Whole process took about 45 minutes. After that we did the same thing with Ollie and Bennie, with Ernie in the room on a down stay. (Ollie had been diagnosed “highly dog aggressive” so we were concerned about the intro.) We kept Ernie in the room because we knew that Ollie was cool with Ernie and figured if Ernie stayed relaxed Ollie might take the hint. He did!
Shocker – no dog fights!
We went to bed that night with our pack of three crated on the floor next to us. 
Next: Bennie’s Big Secret and Vodka Party, aka “why you should crate your dogs instead of giving them the run of the house.”
Other Random Stuff
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.