The Bay City Animal Shelter recently hosted a guest in unusual circumstances with the dog Benny.

Benny himself isn’t too out of the ordinary, Jo Bollman, office manager at the animal shelter said, “have you ever seen a typical black lab? They’re goofy as sin, excited, want to get into everything, that is Benny. He’s a black lab and it looks like he has a little bit of pit in him, and he is just a plain ol goofball, he’s two and a half years old, so he’s still got a lot of energy so we get him out, we get him exercised everyday and that, and he’s just happy to see people, happy to go out and play. He’s a really happy boy!”

A really happy boy, who somehow made his way from California all the way to Michigan over the course of a couple months.

About a month ago Benny first arrived in Bay city, Bollman said, “We had the police bring Benny in, he was found running loose, my kennel attendant brought him up, and we scanned him for a microchip, and sure enough Mr. Benny had a chip.” But soon the shelter learned finding Benny’s family would be a bit more difficult than just looking at the chip.

Bollman said they were able to find Benny’s original owners, a military family in Kentucky. She said that the family told them that they had given Benny away to another family when he was about 6 months old. They told Bollman that shortly later that Benny’s new family was another military family who had transferred to Tennessee, and they had no way to contact them.

Bollman said after over ten days of waiting for someone to come forward to claim Benny, but no one did, so the shelter put him up for adoption. She says they had a photographer come in to take pictures and videos of Benny, they put a video up on YouTube, and within a few days the shelter got a call.

Bollman says the caller said that the shelter had their dog, Benny. The caller explained their side of the story, how after they were transferred to Tennessee they were transferred to California, and in California Benny got out and ran away.

While we know Benny will be flying home to California next week to finally be reunited with his family, it is still anyone's guess how he got to Michigan in the first place.