Dog Is My Copilot: Rescue Tales of Flying Dogs, Second Chances, and the Hero Who Might Live Next Door

by Patrick Regan

  Within twenty-four hours, Wolf and Merrill had all the transport links in place. “Terry made a miracle happen overnight,” says Yohman of Wolf’s transport coordination. On June 19, 2010, just one day after first speaking to Terry Wolf, Yohman went to the Onslow County Animal Control facility to spring Ernie. When the shelter attendant brought him out, he literally jumped into her arms. “He was a total love bug,” she says. “He was so appreciative—almost like he knew he was getting out.” Once in Yohman’s car, Ernie settled into the passenger seat across from her and they headed south.

  Ernie’s next stop was Wilmington, North Carolina, where Yohman met up with another volunteer driver, Donna Bloomer. Bloomer had laid out a blanket for Ernie in the backseat, but in a “calm but determined” way, he climbed across the armrest and, once again, curled up in the shotgun seat.

  “Senior dogs always seem to have a lot of personality, and with Ernie this was especially so,” Bloomer recalls. Still, “it was impossible not to love the little guy,” she says. Once situated to Ernie’s liking—side by side—they made their way farther down the highway to meet Tom and Linda Scott, a couple who would foster Ernie overnight at their home in Loris, South Carolina.

  Ernie may have begun the day in what, for him, were hellish conditions, but walking into the Scotts’ house, he must have thought he’d died and gone to wiener dog heaven. Amiable Ernie fell right in with the Scott’s six resident doxies. He impressed dogs and humans alike at the Scott’s self-proclaimed “Wienerville Resort and Spa.”

  “He was pleasant, congenial, and just an ideal little soul,” reports Tom. “Had arrangements not already been made for Ernie, we would have been thrilled to add him to our herd.”

  For sheer excitement, it’s difficult to follow up a night in the company of a half a dozen wiener dogs, but the next day pilot Brett Grooms kept the thrills coming. Ernie was going to get his wings. The Scotts drove Ernie to Twin City Airport in Loris, where Ernie met PNP volunteer Grooms, who had flown from Charleston, South Carolina, to pick him up.

  Ernie remained unflappable as he settled into Grooms’ Cessna 172 for his first known flight. “He was a perfect passenger,” reports Grooms. “He never made a sound the entire flight. Upon arrival in Savannah, he stretched his little legs and wiggled his tail—he seemed to know he was beginning a new future with a loving family.”

  Though they’d had little more than two hours together, Ernie had worked his magic on another of his liberators. “I tend to be a big dog type of guy,” says Grooms, “and never thought a little brown, stubby legged, long-bodied dog could capture my heart like Ernie, but this awkward-shaped wiener dog did just that. Those who don’t believe an animal can speak directly to your heart have never met a dog like Ernie,” Grooms continues. “There was something special about him.”

  Ernie enjoyed a night to remember at Tom and Linda Scott’s “Wienerville Resort and Spa” in Loris, South Carolina.

  On the ground at Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport, Terry Wolf’s daughter, Shannon, met Grooms and welcomed Ernie to Georgia. The plan was for Shannon to overnight Ernie and then drive the last leg of his transport from Savannah to her mother’s Southern Comfort Animal Rescue in Glenwood, Georgia.

  PNP pilot Brett Grooms (left) took the handoff from Linda and Tom Scott in South Carolina, and ferried Ernie to Savannah, Georgia.

  Ernie never made it to Terry Wolf’s (pictured) Southern Comfort Animal Rescue in Glenwood, Georgia. Her daughter, Shannon, decided to keep Ernie after fostering him for one night along the way. Right: The amazing Ernie exhibits his skills.

  To pilot Grooms and everyone else who had met Ernie along the way, however, it came as no surprise that the little brown dachshund didn’t quite make it to his planned destination. Both Shannon Wolf and her son Mason fell hard for Ernie. His journey would end in Savannah. They decided he was home.

  Terry Wolf, in her new role as Ernie’s grandmother, posted the news via e-mail to Ernie’s fans up and down the Atlantic seaboard, closing out this unlikely rescue appropriately: “So cheers to Ernie—the little polite, loveable dachshund who motivated so many people and captured hearts all along the way!”

  Score one for the little guy.

  “People ask, ‘Why would you spend $500 of your hard-earned money to fly a single dog?’ My answer: ‘It means a lot to that particular dog, and it’s not just about the animals—it’s about all the people who are also affected by his or her transport.’

  “I believe the wonderful people on the ground who spend countless hours helping to coordinate rescues are why so many pilots readily offer their aircraft, time, and money to transport animals across the United States. The ground rescuers have such passion to help animals, and that passion is infectious. Pilots also have an incredible passion to fly, and when we combine flying and animals, it makes for a wonderful blend.”

  —Brett Grooms, PNP pilot and Ernie liberator

  Chance Encounter

  NAME: Chance

  BREED: Great Pyrenees mix

  AGE: Puppy

  TOTAL MILEAGE:

  153

  ROUTE:

  Nicholas County, Kentucky–Indianapolis, Indiana

  The Nicholas County, Kentucky, animal shelter wouldn’t normally be considered a lucky place for a dog to end up, but for a three-month-old ball of white fur appropriately named Chance, it was just the right place—at precisely the right time. Chance had entered the shelter as a stray, and when no one claimed him after the mandatory hold period, shelter volunteer Kathy Chase began trying to place the Great Pyrenees mix with a rescue group.

  “The next morning, I got a rather rushed e-mail asking if I could be at the regional airport in the next county in an hour with Chance,” recalls Chase. In a coincidence of timing, Pilots N Paws volunteer Bob Born was soon due to take off with an adult Pyrenees from a neighboring shelter, bound for the same Indy Great Pyrenees Rescue.

  “I grabbed the puppy and raced to the airport,” says Kathy, “arriving just in time to watch ‘Pilot Bob’ (she wouldn’t learn his last name until later) land his small plane and taxi over to us. He emerged smiling, and said, ‘Great day to fly!’ Chance and the adult Pyrenees hopped in the rear seats, taxied away, and off they went into the wild blue yonder.” Not surprisingly, Chance was adopted out shortly after arriving.

  PNP pilot Bob Born (in white shirt, above) enjoyed the companionship of Chance and an adult Great Pyrenees on the rescue flight from Kentucky to Indianapolis. Rescue volunteers Kathy Chase (top left) and Barbar Eblen (top right) transported the dogs to the airport.

  Dorie’s Story

  NAME: Dorie

  BREED: Belgian sheepdog

  AGE: Three

  TOTAL MILEAGE:

  2,006

  ROUTE:

  Harrisburg, Pennsylvania–Breezewood, Pennsylvania*

  Breezewood, Pennsylvania–Washington, Pennsylvania*

  Washington, Pennsylvania–St. Clairsville, Ohio*

  St. Clairsville, Ohio–Columbus, Ohio*

  Columbus, Ohio–Kansas City, Missouri

  Kansas City, Missouri–Lawrence, Kansas*

  Lawrence, Kansas–Guymon, Oklahoma

  Guymon, Oklahoma–Santa Fe, New Mexico

  Santa Fe, New Mexico–Albuquerque, New Mexico*

  Albuquerque, New Mexico–Tucson, Arizona

  * Ground (car) transport leg

  There are a million reasons why pets wind up homeless. For Dorie, a rangy, coal-black Belgian sheepdog, one reason was simply the intensity of her staring eyes.

  Until early 2009 Dorie led a vagabond life, passed from one home to another by owners who had initially been attracted by her intelligence, attentiveness, and energy, but ultimately frustrated that the dog didn’t turn out to be what they had expected.

  Dorie’s overattentive gaze was partially responsible for one of her many busted adoptions.

  Dorie spent the first three years of her life in a chaotic home so overpopulated with pets that local auth
orities finally forced the owner to remove several dogs. Adopted by a family in South Carolina, she seemed to have improved her lot in life. But the adoption didn’t take. Her new owners became so disconcerted by the way the large herding dog stared at their toddler that they decided to give her up.

  Next was a short stay in Connecticut. Owner allergies necessitated another move after only a few weeks. A family in New York answered a newspaper ad about Dorie and she was packed up again. After two weeks, that family decided Dorie’s energy level was more than they could handle.

  As its name suggests, the Belgian sheepdog is a herding dog. As a breed, they are considered intelligent and highly trainable. They are known for their alertness and for their penchant to seek out and maintain eye contact with their owners. For these reasons and others, they are often used as assistance dogs or in police and search-and-rescue work.

  But despite her pedigree and potential, after being cast out of four homes in the span of a few months, Dorie seemed to be running out of chances.

  In the course of moving from home to home, Dorie’s history had become muddled. By this time, in addition to being misunderstood by owners unfamiliar with her breed, she had also been without the anti-epileptic and hypothyroid medications that had been prescribed years earlier. Without her medication, she was having violent seizures multiple times daily.

  Unable to cope with the dog and unsure what to do, Dorie’s New York family asked a friend for help. She was a dog breeder in Pennsylvania, and after hearing Dorie’s story, she agreed to take the dog in.

  There’s a point in every rescue story when the tide of misfortune is turned. According to Lynnette Bennett, head of the North American Belgian Sheepdog Rescue (NABSDR), that point was reached when the Good Samaritan in Pennsylvania welcomed Dorie into her home. “This woman,” Bennett says, “saved Dorie’s life.”

  The woman took Dorie to her vet who diagnosed the dog’s health problems and prescribed medication to get her seizures under control. By this time, the woman had fallen hard for Dorie and wanted to keep her. But she feared for the dog’s safety. She was a breeder of terriers and worried that if Dorie had a seizure when she wasn’t home, the dogs might mistake her for prey and attack. She tracked down Dorie’s breeder for advice. She was shocked at his response. He insisted that the dog be put down and pressured her to keep Dorie’s health problems to herself. That’s when Dorie’s benefactor had the good fortune to come across a force of nature named Lynnette Bennett.

  As head of the NABSDR, Lynnette Bennett has rescued, fostered, rehabilitated, and trained hundreds of dogs—most of them Belgians. She’s passionate about the breed, and few people know it better. Bennett works full-time to care for and train the dogs, and maintains a nationwide network of other volunteers, foster homes, and Belgian advocates. She does all of this on a volunteer basis. And she does it all from a wheelchair.

  The woman in Pennsylvania recounted Dorie’s history to Bennett over the phone. More than two thousand miles away, in Tucson, Arizona, Bennett listened with an open heart and mind. And while she was aggrieved at the transient life the dog had led, she wasn’t particularly surprised to hear that Dorie had been given up so many times.

  “Every one of this dog’s owners had fallen in love with it,” explains Bennett. “But Belgian sheepdogs are herding dogs. They have some very specific traits that don’t work for all families.”

  When Dorie’s caretaker told her about the big dog’s propensity to stare, she smiled knowingly. “Herding dogs love to maintain eye contact,” she says. “They will always seek out your gaze and that does unnerve some people.”

  With that call to Bennett, Dorie was on her way to a new life—and, as it turns out, a higher purpose. In addition to running NABSDR, Lynnette Bennett trains Belgian sheepdogs to be service dogs. As she pieced together Dorie’s checkered history, she became more convinced that the dog was a prime prospect to be a companion animal.

  Bennett began to work out a transport scenario to move Dorie from Pennsylvania to her home in Tucson. She found volunteer drivers to get the dog as far as Columbus, Ohio. She had also posted transport requests on the Pilots N Paws message board. From his home in Kansas City, Missouri, pilot Sam Taylor saw the request. As it turned out, he was going to be flying two English cocker spaniels from Kansas City to Columbus in just a few days. Working together, Taylor, Bennett, and the woman coordinating the cocker spaniel transport settled on a schedule.

  Wanda and Sam Taylor fell in love with Dorie during a three-week fostering stint in Kansas City.

  PNP pilot J. P. Held flew Dorie from Guyman, Oklahoma, to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  On the afternoon of March 26, 2009, Sam Taylor loaded Dorie into the backseat of his 1964 Piper Cherokee and took off from the Columbus airport bound for Kansas City. It was the second leg of Sam’s first mission for Pilots N Paws. He immediately developed an affinity for his passenger. “She was a beautiful dog,” Sam remembers. “Pretty mellow but also very aware of everything that was going on. It’s like she knew she was being rescued.”

  By the time he had landed safely back in Kansas City, he was downright smitten. It was nearly 9 p.m. when they arrived, so he and Bennett had already decided that Dorie would stay the night with the Taylors before continuing on her journey.

  Less population density and greater distance between cities makes finding volunteer pilots more difficult west of the Mississippi. To make matters worse, several wildfires in Texas in the spring of 2009 were making flying toward the Southwest tricky. Bennett e-mailed Taylor to say that she was looking for a foster home for Dorie in Kansas City until conditions improved. Sam e-mailed back immediately. Dorie would be welcome in his home as long as necessary.

  It took three weeks for Bennett to work out a transport plan to get Dorie the rest of the way to Tucson. By that time, Dorie had come to feel like part of the Taylor family, enjoying the company of their two golden retrievers and accompanying Sam on his morning runs. “By the time transportation had been worked out, my wife and I had both fallen in love with her,” remembers Taylor with a laugh. “We were ready to call Lynnette and tell her that Dorie had run away.”

  Instead, the Taylors handed Dorie off to a NABSDR foster volunteer in nearby Lawrence, Kansas. A week later, Dorie was in the air again, first flying from Lawrence to Guymon, Oklahoma, and then, with another volunteer pilot, on to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  That pilot drove Dorie to Albuquerque and delivered her to a foster volunteer—a retired air force pilot disabled in Vietnam who lives up in the mountains and runs a de facto shelter, taking in “dogs that nobody wants.” After a few days spent among this small pack of castoffs, Dorie was driven back to Albuquerque, where she was put on a flight to Tucson. It had taken twenty drivers, pilots, and foster volunteers and nearly forty days and nights to get Dorie from Pennsylvania to Tucson. Lynnette Bennett—the woman who cobbled together this unlikely journey, was there to greet her at the airport.

  “Successful rescue takes an entire team. In my cases I may be the one who puts the pieces together, but without all the caring volunteers evaluating, teaching basic obedience commands, driving, fostering (especially longer than planned), going to the vet, getting to airports, flying, and so on . . . well, there’d be no pieces to put together.”

  —Lynnette Bennett, North American Belgian Sheepdog Rescue

  During the course of Dorie’s odyssey, Bennett had stayed in constant contact with the dog’s caretakers. According to Bennett, the big black dog left a trail of broken hearts all along the way. “Sam [Taylor] is not the only one who fell in love with her instantly,” says Bennett. “Despite all her handicaps, she’s a dream dog, and every driver, pilot, or foster household she met between Pennsylvania and here fell for her.”

  Bennett began Dorie’s training immediately and found her a quick study. “Dorie stayed here for a few weeks, learning to pick up a cell phone and hand it to someone, open and close doors, ignore food dropped on the floor, walk very close to a wheelchair
, turn light switches on and off, brace herself to steady her owner for transfers from wheelchair to toilet or bed, and to take half steps one at a time, halting after each one. She was an extremely bright dog and eager to learn.”

  “In all those homes, I don’t think she’d ever had all her needs met before,” Bennett says. “It’s not that people didn’t care or didn’t love her, but this is a highly specialized breed. These dogs aren’t content to be pets—they want to work.”

  Bennett places her “graduate” dogs in homes all across the country, but for the well-traveled Dorie, she was able to find a perfect match right there in Tucson. “This woman had lost her twelve-year-old service dog and says that Dorie got her through that loss by loving her, as well as providing help with fragile mobility,” Bennett reports. “Dorie also goes out and returns with the paper and mail by herself and has an extensive fan club on her owner’s regular city bus rides.”

  As for Bennett, she’s delighted to have Dorie living in the same city where she can visit every few months. “Dorie’s life is so settled now,” she says, “that she was able to get off her medication and has remained seizure-free.”

  It’s nice to be loved, but for some dogs it’s even more important to be needed. After so many years adrift and misunderstood, Dorie is finally both.

  The Round-Tripper

  NAME: Sammie

  BREED: Dachshund

  AGE: Two

  TOTAL MILEAGE:

  834

  ROUTE:

  Auburn, California–Vacaville, California*