TWO GREAT DANES NAMED LILY AND MADDISON

Back in October, there was a big news story in the UK about two Great Danes named Lily and Maddison. These two dogs were given up by their owners because they couldn't care for them.  But these were not just any Great Danes.  They were special for the reason that Lily was blind, and Maddison was Lily's guide dog.

The reason Lily was blind was because she had entropion when she was a puppy, which is a condition I told you about in a previous blog entry.  Lily's entropion was so very bad that her eyelashes grew into her eyes, and she had to have her eyes removed.  So Lily learned to follow Maddison around everywhere, and they were the best of buddies, and they never wanted to be apart.

But, like I said, the people who owned these two dogs couldn't keep them anymore, and last July they brought them to the Dog Trust Shrewsbury, which is in Shropshire, England.  Lily was five years old, and Maddison was six.  The people at the adoption shelter started trying to find homes for the two dogs, but nobody wanted to adopt two gigantic dogs together.

Then in October, the story was in all the news, and everybody saw it, and suddenly there were hundreds of phone calls from people who wanted to adopt the two dogs.  The couple who got chosen to adopt the two dogs were from Cheshire, and they converted their garage into a big dog house just for the two girls.  So the Great Danes went there to live, and everybody thought they would live happily ever after.






Except that things didn't work out that way.  Because what happened was that not long after the dogs moved to their new home, Lily started attacking Maddison.  Probably this was because she was feeling really stressed.  Their humans tried several times to get the girls to accept each other again, but they just couldn't get along anymore.



So Lily went back to the shelter, and in December, not long before Christmas, she got adopted.  It took a little while for her to get used to her new home, since she is blind, but by New Year's, she had settled in very nicely.  Her family said she enjoyed going for walks, and she liked to play with her toys.

And that is the end of the story, at least as far as I can tell, because the shelter said they would not do any more updates.  Which means that there really was a happy ending, but it wasn't the one people were expecting. And sometimes that's how things happen in life!